Darwin's Stepchildren
by Ria-angelo
Summary: Michaelangelo makes a decision that brings an old enemy back into his brothers' lives – and changes his family forever. PG13 for some violence. Continuity: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Vol. 1, Mirage Studios. Dual authorship: Ria & Dee
1. Preface

**Preface**

In early 1984, a pair of young New England artists showed up at a New Hampshire comic book convention with a one-issue, odd-sized, black-and-white book spoofing a bunch of comics traditions:

Supervillains.

Ninjas.

Mutagen ooze.

To Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's vast surprise, people couldn't get enough of their creation. More than 20 years later, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have appeared in so many incarnations we can't even count 'em all – eight or nine different major comic book lines, at least seven distinct television series, four feature-length films, 30 or 40 video games, and about a billion different merchandising gimmicks. Back in the early '90s, the TMNT even toured in a rock musical!

They're mostly known as the heroes of children's toys and cartoons, but our favorite version is Eastman and Laird's original Mirage Studios comic book series, geared for (slightly) older readers. The crew at the Northampton, Mass.-based studios delivered a number of brilliant stories about the young ninja mutants over about 10 years, stories that are action-packed and full of a wild sense of possibilities and fun, yet touch on deep themes about family and courage and healing and life.

In 1999, we started "Darwin's Stepchildren" as a back-and-forth writing exercise based on some of those tales. For a few days, we traded snippets of story for each other to pick up and run with for a few paragraphs per round.

But after reaching what's now halfway through Chapter II, we stalled...until late October 2006. This time, the story kept growing by leaps and bounds over the course of four weeks while pretty much consuming our lives, both as writers and as eagerly-awaiting editors – the question for both of us was always: "What's gonna happen next!?!?"

While Ria wrote most of the 2006 prose, Dee's edits, guidance, contributions, insights, and above all her abiding faith and enthusiasm for the story are, quite simply, the reason "Darwin's Stepchildren" now exists.

Of course we don't own the rights to nor claim any credit for the licensed characters and story references that appear in this tale, most of whom belong to the fine folks of Mirage Studios. A nod to those gents, who've made all our lives a little richer. We hope to carry on that tradition with this story, sharing some hint of what appeals to us about the remarkably archetypal Turtles and their adventures.

Here's a quick summary of the core TMNT stories we drew from for "Darwin's Stepchildren," including some of our assumptions about "how it _really_ was!".

**The basics:** The Turtles got their start at an ordinary turtle hatchery in the late 1960s/early 1970s, then found their way via the pet shop trade to New York City. A young boy bought the four and was carrying them home when a truck slammed on its brakes. A canister that fell off the truck's back careened through the air, knocked the turtles' bowl from the boy's hands, and fell with the not-yet-fearsome foursome into the storm drains.

There, the broken canister released a mysterious, powerful mutagen ooze that soon transformed the four turtles and a curious rat into near-humans.

Meanwhile, an unusual rat called Splinter had fled to the streets and tunnels after his owner, Japanese ninja master Hamato Yoshi, was killed by a rival in New York. After being exposed, himself, to the strange ooze, Splinter came to adopt the turtles as both sons and students, raising them in secret beneath the City. He passed on Yoshi's teachings there in hopes of avenging the murder.

The Turtles became: Leonardo, the focused leader who carries twin _katana_ swords; Donatello, the thoughtful science wizard who wields a _bo_ staff; Raphael, the hard-headed powerhouse who uses three-pronged daggers called _sai_; and Michaelangelo, the light-hearted artist who spins two chain-joined sticks called _nunchaku_.

Fifteen years later, the Turtles claimed that vengeance, defeating Yoshi's killer – the criminal mastermind Shredder – in a rooftop battle. But one horrible Christmas night a few months later, when the family had gathered to celebrate the holiday with their human friend April, the man they'd thought dead returned with a horde of his ninja followers. The Foot Clan caught Leonardo alone and beat him nearly to death before tossing him through the window of April's apartment.

With the help of Raphael's friend Casey Jones, the Turtles survived the full-on attack that followed. As April's apartment building burned to the ground, they escaped by U-Haul to the Jones family farm in western Massachusetts.

During the City At War series, Casey met and married a woman pregnant with another man's child. When she died in labor, Casey returned to New York with her baby girl, called Shadow. He and April raised Shadow together in the apartment building April now owns. The Turtles and Splinter came to join them, living in converted tunnels beneath the City.

**The books:** The Turtles eventually returned to New York and defeated the Shredder once and for all. Meanwhile, they had adventures in and around Northampton that include two extraordinary stories we drew from quite heavily for "Darwin's Stepchildren."

In the one-shot "Twilight of the Ring" by Rick McCollum and Bill Anderson, Donatello, haunted by the call of the spirit of all turtles, leads his brothers into a strange prehistoric jungle outside time. There, they battle with a huge, rodent-like monster called simply "The Adversary," which preys on the spirits of reptiles.

Rick Veitch's three-part series "The River" pitted the Turtles against Old Man River, the age-twisted being that rules the Connecticut River in western Massachusetts. They do so with the help of a Native American called Abanak, fighting a monster of the river and some serious industrial pollution along the way.

**The setting:** We've placed our tale at least a decade after the above events, meaning the Turtles are in their early 30s. And we deviate from how Mirage presented the death of Master Splinter.

That should be all you need to know before diving in! So go ahead. Take the plunge. We promise – if you have even a tenth of the fun reading this that we did writing it, it'll be worth the time!

Ria & Dee

Nov. 2006


	2. Chapter I  The Call of the Valley

**I. The Call of the Valley**

The bloody-furred arm swung out of the roiling black fog again and Donatello threw himself aside, landing badly on the leg the monster had once broken.

Its blade-sharp claws connected with another mark, though. Don choked on his own shriek as the creature ripped through Mike's plastron with a single swipe. His brother hit the ground screaming and curled over, as the huge black shadow loomed after.

"Mike!" Don shouted. He lunged forward to parry the monster's next blow.

But a tackle from behind knocked him to the ground, and then Leo was on him, pinning him, keeping him from protecting their brother. A horrible crack sounded – like a lobster, Don thought, erratic images of steaming red crustaceans erupting across his vision – as the creature's jaws closed on Mike's back shell.

"Not you too – " Leo hissed at his ear, forcing Don backward. The monster was tearing Mike apart – Don could _hear_ it. He fought Leo mindlessly as the shrieks intensified. Their brother HAD to be dead by now, HAD to at least have lost consciousness – why wouldn't he stop _screaming_!?

"Not you!" Leo repeated, shoving Don's shoulders down for the dozenth time.

And then the claws came out of the darkness at _them_.

Donatello, ninja- and brother-trained, had snatched up his bo and gained his feet before his eyes could open. Even when they did, it took a few moments for his grip to slacken, his breathing to slow and his focus to beat back the fighter's adrenaline surging through his sleep-thickened blood.

The living room was cold, deserted, and dustier than he'd realized by flashlight a few hours before. The first thin grey wash of dawn had seeped in through the boarded-up windows, now, revealing the strange marks of his footprints on the dulled farmhouse floor. He noted the camp blanket rumpled at his feet, the yellow crumble of foam stuffing torn by some growing rodent family and trailing out of the couch cushions he'd borrowed for sleep.

Sleep. He snorted involuntarily. As if. He swiped a wrist across his face and turned to pack.

Some time later, Don leaned his forehead wearily against the kitchen door's windowpane, his drink steaming up the glass and tickling at his nostrils.

A soft whisper of sound told him Raph was awake now, too. "Want some coffee?" he offered without looking around.

Raph made a grumbling noise of negation, then took the battered mug anyway. He muttered into the rim, "...too blasted early..."

Don shrugged and didn't order him to get his own. They were all exhausted and tense; it wouldn't do to snap his own frustration at his brother.

A thin cloud slipped out from the berry-picking hill, catching enough of the coming sun to leave a purple spot dancing in front of Don's eyes. "Mike used to love sunrises..." he mused.

"Well, he's missin' this one." Raph shoved the mug back at him and glared through the glass. "I heard yelling," he said after a moment. "You dreamed again?"

"Not exactly," he corrected. "I think I had more of a classic dream this morning, subconscious processing of stress. At some level, of course, dreams are just a psychic manifestation of anxiety that – "

His brother shifted impatiently. "Can't ya just say you had a nightmare?"

The edge of the sun heaved into view, brilliant and cold. They watched it through the open patch where they'd pried a board loose, the night before.

"Did _you_ dream?" Don countered.

No answer.

He sighed. "I guess it's time we head out," he said, moving to the counter to re-pack the tiny camp stove.

When they reached the barn, they found Leonardo already waiting, focused and ready, his shoulders faintly steaming from the katas he'd performed. As they shrugged on the last of their gear together, Don watched his brothers, weighing the reluctance under Leo's thin veneer of calm and Raph's carefully posed indifference.

"We don't have to do this," he reminded them.

Raph glared. "You talked pretty big back in the City about comin' out here," he said. "You said it was the only way to get him to quit showing up in our heads every night."

Don lifted his palms in appeal. "I don't know anything for certain, Raph," he said. "All I said was, it's possible the Great Turtle needs our help. If you don't want to come, you could stay behind with Mike."

Leo, bent over to adjust his kneepad, just tugged a little harder on the straps.

Don secured his bo staff across his back shell and turned to look back at the farmhouse, hiding his own apprehension.

It didn't help. Time had not been kind to the old building. The peeling paint and sagging porch spoke clearly of all the years it had sat empty. Don knew there were structural problems, things that could actually be explained and defined, that gave it the seedy, run-down air. But the idea that stuck in his head was: _It's dead. The soul of the house is gone._

And they were leaving Mike to it...

Raph hunched his shell into the ragged cape he favored. "It's not gonna get any easier for waitin'."

"True." Leo brushed at the dark stain on one of his leather elbow pads. "Let's go."

Don shivered as they turned away. But somehow, with each step that took them further from the house, he felt lighter, more confident they were doing the right thing. The Turtles melted into the underbrush, carefully silent. He found it easier than he'd expected to fall into the old rhythms of forest stealth and secrecy, even after their years back in the City – although one major difference remained between those long-ago days, and now.

Three move differently than four.

But then, halfway up the second hill, they caught sight of someone sitting beside of the path. _He must have snuck out when Leo went out for his katas,_ Don thought. Mike.

A bold move... Mike had begged them to let him come north. Leo accepted only when he promised he would stay at the farmhouse as rear guard until they returned.

Mike stood up when they approached. Leo passed him without a word, and after a moment's hesitation, Mike fell in behind Raph and Don, picking up the steady, mile-eating trot Leo had set.

Don wasn't sure if he'd expected it or not. He watched Leo for some kind of reaction, but only a tensing of the lead Turtle's shoulders showed he was even aware of Mike's presence. Silently, Don adopted Mike's choice to join them into their plans.

Together, the four continued up the hill. Looking closely in the early sunlight, Don could begin to see odd changes emerging in the vegetation around them – ferns were larger, here, and something like black creeper vines twisted up unnerving trees just off the path. The familiar forests of the Connecticut River Valley were transforming around them into the jungle they recognized from their restless dreams of the past three weeks.

The brothers paused at the crest, Leo signaling them to wait while he climbed what might once have been a maple tree.

"Look over there," Mike said, pointing to where some tall undergrowth had sprouted hairy pods. "It's already happening."

Don had already reconciled himself to the oncoming change. Wordlessly, he handed some of his extra gear to Mike, who stuffed it into a hastily-stocked hiking pack.

Raph, however, was fingering his sai. "This sucks," he snapped. "I hate bein' here."

Don winced, looking around as though someone might have heard. He thought back to the kind, melancholy voice that had haunted the strange land those years ago. _I wonder if the Great Turtle's the type to be offended._ "But Raph, there shouldn't be a – a mammal-thing – this time."

"Yeah, who knows what kind o' monster's gonna get thrown at us instead."

Don swallowed, remembering the morning's dream.

Suddenly, Raph snorted, stepping closer and flicking at the pouch of riverstones hanging at Don's belt. "'Shouldn't be a mammal-thing,'" he echoed. "Looks like you didn't leave your magic crap at home, though."

"It's not magic," he snapped as Mike watched nervously. "They're tools of the earth, for balance. And no..." he conceded, because they didn't have time to waste on being at each other's throats. "...I don't know what to expect out here."

Don fingered the rough cloth around the stones, the ones he'd used so many years ago to try to save their lives. In that other world, they had become the substitute for his prized technology, used to strengthen the connection between himself and the spirit that had called them with such need.

He had no idea if they would fail this time, too.

Arguing about it would be pointless. They'd been called by the dreams to venture again into a prehistoric version of the western Massachusetts hills, and they'd agreed. A few minutes more, and they would finish the plunge into its valley and whatever dangers it held.

"It'll be different this time," Mike said hopefully.

Only Mike, when they'd finally called him, had claimed to be excited by the dreams instead of disturbed. In fact, he dove into embellishing them, weaving memory-scenes of the Turtles' journey through this strange, ancient jungle so many years ago with fresh wonder. It wasn't surprising, really, Don thought in retrospect, looking more closely at that brother. Mike had always been the most fearless of them all. He was the one who always found the humor in what could have so easily been macabre in their lives.

But there was little humor now.

He nodded, realizing both Mike and Raph were waiting for some kind of response. "Of course it'll be different," he said.

Raph muttered something and stared up through the limbs where Leo had disappeared. Mike, grinning a little, chewed at a nail.

No humor... The tension between Mike and the rest of them was still too intense, like a thin vibration on a tight-pulled string. Almost two years this way, and it hadn't faded – only gone underground.

Don decided that about this, too, he wasn't surprised. After all, Mike had destroyed nearly everything they'd cherished in that one impulsive, selfish decision.

Suddenly, he felt a strange chill come over him. It was nothing the extra gear he wore could keep out — it came from inside himself, from the oldest core of his being, the most primitive part of his mind. It was followed immediately by a warm rush outward from that same place, a sense of love and acceptance — and urgency.

The tree rustled, and Leo dropped from its lowest limb. "Northeast," he announced.

"Let's go," Don heard a voice answer in low command. He was almost surprised to realize it was his own.

It took only two hours before the strain between Michaelangelo and Leonardo thickened into a presence worse than that of the ancient jungle's fog years ago.

Leo fought down another wave of irritation as he turned and saw Mike lagging again. _I should never have allowed him to come...he's a liability out here_. He pulled to a stop at a wide space under the trees. "Mike! Hurry up!"

Raph, too, eyed their approaching brother with obvious misgivings. They watched as their brother broke into a trot for the final few yards, his breathing labored. "You been lettin' yourself get all soft in the City?" Raph said as Mike came up. His gruff tone was spoiled by the question in his voice.

"No, I'm — "

"Holding us up?" Leo suggested acidly.

Mike's eyes narrowed. "You telling us that all of a sudden you know where we're going, Leo? Huh? You in a hurry to get someplace I don't know about?" he demanded, gesturing sharply at the deep green shadows around them, and Leo felt his fists clench. _I'm going to slug him, so help me – _

"Hold it!" Don stepped between him and Mike, warding them from each other. "We don't have time for you two to hash this out again."

"What's the rush, if we don't have any place else to be?" Leo heard himself say. Heat pounded behind his eyes. He took a step forward, thinking only of the arrogant look on Mike's face. _Where does he get the gall to challenge _meHe dropped into a smooth, practiced move he knew Mike would respond to with answering aggression, intending to force his brother to understand the mistake he'd made —

— and found himself on the receiving end of a well-placed bo's block. Before he could even register his astonishment, Don followed through by sweeping his leader's legs out from under him.

"We do NOT have time for this," Don said again, with a flat emphasis that took some of the edge off Leo's anger.

Behind them, Raph had forced Mike back off the trail and pinned him to a tree. "You two have got to stop this," he seconded. "It gets real old, especially when I can't just let you pound on each other 'til you get it out of your systems."

"What do you mean? You think I can't take him?!" Mike raged.

Raph cuffed his brother lightly with his free hand. "Nah, he just gets pissy when you kick his ass."

Leo rolled to his feet and stood stiffly away from his brothers. The anger was only beginning to fade into recognition that he had lost control. He had a feeling that he would regret it more as the day wore on.

Mike shook off Raph's containing grip and stood against the tree.

"Don't patronize me," he said softly. "I can't kick his ass. I haven't kicked anybody's anything in...I don't know how long."

Leo opened his mouth.

"Shut the hell up, Leo," Mike cut him off tiredly, his voice resigned. "I give up. You were right. I shouldn't've tried to come."

It took a moment, with emotions running so high, for that to sink in.

"What are you saying?" Raph demanded.

Mike paused for a moment, eyes on Leo, as though waiting for a protest. Then: "I'm saying, I'm outta here." He turned back the way they had come.

Leo shrugged. Began scanning for a clear path again. But a growl built behind him. Mike had gone only a few dozen yards before Raph stormed after, grabbed him by the arm and hauled him back through the trees, casually disabling each of Mike's furious attempts to free himself.

Leo suddenly realized what his brother was doing and jerked away – too late. Raph had snagged the back of his carapace, and he shoved the two together. Leo turned his head to avoid having to look at Mike's defiled face.

"You make nice," Raph said in a voice that chilled the air. "You _walk_. And you don't give any of the craptastic creatures runnin' around this godforsaken place any more advantage than they've already got. Got it?"

Leo matched Raph's steely glare, then slid his eyes sideways to look Mike up and down, one slow time, his lip curled slightly in contempt.

"Tell Mike," he said in a low voice, "to keep up."

They heard nothing of the Great Turtle's voice that day.


	3. Chapter II  Old Man River

**II. Old Man River**

By nightfall, the growth around them already matched the steamy, crawling vegetation that surrounded them in the final stages of their last journey into the prehistoric land. Mike suppressed a shiver as they settled into camp.

That third night of their adventure had not been a good one, he remembered. Don had fallen to the Adversary in its horrible, violence-ridden fog, joining him and Raph in a layer of time separate from their last brother, and they had waited in its darkness for what seemed an eternity, hoping Leonardo would return.

_The dreams back in New York were a lot better than the reality_, Mike admitted, adding dashes of salt and spices to their meal. In the city, set against the lingering dirt-ridden snowdrifts of early spring, the endless green and heat in their dreams had seemed exotic and wild. Now, moving through this valley, Mike couldn't relax enough to enjoy either its weird beauty or the warmth, watching instead the shadows of the unnatural trees and trying to ignore the odd tang in the scent of the air.

He hated the feeling that he already knew how their adventure was going to play out.

_I'm not going to be the first one out, this trip, _he told himself grimly, remembering the claws that came out of the fog at him during that first night's watch, and jammed the end of a stick deep into the coals of their low fire. The others kept eating, Leo with his back to their fire, their silence not quite comfortable.

"No fog, so far," Mike ventured.

"Uhn." Don didn't look up from the patch he was sewing, between bites, over a tear in his bedroll.

They'd been quiet during that last visit to the valley, too, he remembered. The pain he'd felt from his injuries when he woke was nothing compared to realizing his brothers had abandoned him after the attack. It had taken nearly the entire day to gather himself again, in the face of that monstrous betrayal, and much longer than they'd realized to forgive them – even after finding Raph, battered and bloody and likewise abandoned, mid-way through the second night, and Don with his broken leg on the fourth.

Forgiveness came only when he could admit his hurt had been fueled by something more. Mike knew the mysterious Turtle Spirit that had somehow touched Don and, later, Leo, had touched him, too...and found him lacking.

Sparks bounced up and faded as Mike poked the fire again. Being back at the mercies of both jungle and Spirit was feeling more and more like a fool's errand by the hour. _But I had the dreams this time, just like the others,_ he reminded himself. _That's gotta mean_ _I'm supposed to be out here with them, no matter what Leo says._

But he felt that wariness ease fractionally as he looked around at his brothers. In spite of the old pain, just being with them was a comfort. He could remember what it was like when they had still been one... Mike listened to the others finishing the spaghetti he'd cooked (two boxes down, six to go), and wished he'd eaten his more slowly. It would help keep his mind off the dread of what might come.

He tried again to start some banter. "I hate camp rations," he began.

"You're the one who cooked it," Raph observed.

"Yeah, but you never get enough to eat, and it's always the same boring, bland - "

"You didn't have to come out here," Leo snapped, not bothering to turn around.

Biting his lip, Mike bent to washing and packing away their dinnerware in silence.

"Time for first watch..." their leader announced as Raph banked the fire. Leo stretched and got to his feet. "Since we're all here, we'll do two-guard shifts tonight. Don or Raph?"

"I'll take first with ya, Leo," Mike volunteered instead, grabbing for his boots. "I'm not tired."

"So don't sleep. Donatello."

That brother shrugged, scraping the last pasta from his camp plate. "All right," he said.

The words "fool's errand" echoed in Mike's mind.

A few hours passed, in silence but for Raph's snores. Though he knew it was childish, Mike sat fending off sleep close to the fire, where fewer of the stinging bugs like mosquitoes seemed to hover and dive for his exposed flesh.

He noticed a lizard, attracted by the soft red light, making her way down the closest tree. She had never seen light like this before, he guessed, that shifted and glowed like sun through leaves, yet came from the ground, colored like flowers... She hopped closer, moving out of the tall, sharp-edged grasses and onto the earth stamped clear by his boots and his brothers' feet. She paused. The heat and light flickered on her skin, shining through the translucence of her tiny skull. She hopped for the light.

Michaelangelo's hand shot out and snatched her from the air, and he cradled the thumb-sized green creature protectively in his palms. "Hi, you. Fire's bad. Hot. Stay away..." he whispered, fatigue cracking his voice. Across the campsite, Leo stirred a little, glancing back before returning his gaze to the dark trees. "What's a lizard like you doing in a weird world like this, huh? Wonder if you just live forever in this jungle, in limbo... Say, you wouldn't happen to know where a giant turtle hangs out, would ya?"

"We'll find him," Leo said, voice cutting through the darkness. "Or he'll find us. The dreams led us back, it's just a matter of time."

Mike stuck his tongue out at his brother's back. A snort told him Don, on watch on the far side of camp, had seen.

"You shouldn't be handling that thing," Leo's voice continued. "It's probably got salmonella all over it. Just send it into the woods or something...unless you want a pet."

"A pet? Nah. This little guy might grow up into a tyrannosaur, or Godzilla." Mike shoved himself up with a sigh and stepped past the snoring bulk of Raph, toward the undergrowth, feeling the lizard bouncing frantically against the box of his fingers. "Come on, let's get ya back home, you– YAH!"

Leo was at his side, blades drawn, before Mike's 'chuks made it from back pocket to spin.

"Abanak," his brother said, managing to sound almost unsurprised.

"Leonardo."

Mike cupped the lizard defensively in his right hand. _What's _he _doing here? _As the light from their campfire flickered over the man before him, his memory flickered with images. Abanak...the one who had fought beside them along the Connecticut River back when they were teens. The one who helped them get Raphael back, after the leech sent by Old Man River had sucked their brother's mutagen out and left him a regular turtle.

"Long time no see," Raph said now from his tossed-aside blankets.

"Yes. It is good to see you well and whole, Raphael."

Leo gestured, welcoming the man into their tiny camp. At first glance, Abanak's stiff blue jeans and embroidered vest were an improvement over the worn loincloth they'd left him in – Mike reluctantly admired the two yellow turtles stitched below the shoulders – but the man was care-lined, his ponytail streaked with grey and his jeans looking weathered by anything but designer machines. Mike found himself wondering just what the long years of solitude had been like, since Abanak had replaced the ancient and treacherous Old Man River as the guiding source of the Connecticut.

Abanak crossed to Don, who came to his feet and met the man's gaze calmly. "Donatello. So you are learning to walk with confidence among the dreams. Well done."

Mike squinted. _What's that supposed to mean? What's Donnie been up to? _

"Thank you," Don bowed. "Dreams of this jungle, and experiences we had here years ago, led us here."

"The Great Turtle. He called me, too." Abanak gently touched his head, then swayed a little. He lowered himself, suddenly, to squat among their packs. "I am sorry… I am weary. I have been wandering for too many days."

They kicked up the fire, offered water and light biscuits, their unspoken questions hanging in the air like the smoke. Mike stroked the tiny lizard in his hand with one finger, feeling her paper-thin sides swell and fall with her breaths.

Abanak ate quietly, squinting at their circle. "You had a teacher."

Don nodded, spoke for them. "Our sensei, Splinter. He has passed on."

"Such an honor. I am sure he continues his journey in peace." The man ran a finger around the tin mug Leo had handed him. "I also remember there were four Turtles, years ago, who taught me the truth of the Old Man of the River. Yet now, only three return to the land of their beginnings. And with a man, who I have not met," he said, looking at Mike.

His heart pounded suddenly. Mike rocked backward and ran a hand through his hair, looking to his brothers. Don gave a nod.

"We're all here," he said with a grin. "It's me, Mike. Michaelangelo. I just look a little different now."

Abanak stared, and did not return the smile.

"It's a long story," Mike said lamely. He fell quiet, but when no one spoke he glanced again at Leo and went on. "Okay, see, a while back I met these people, scientists, at this great research hospital in New York. I got to trust them, and we figured out some genetic techniques that would continue the mutating process. So we – so I could walk in the world. And, well, it worked."

"You changed yourself – from turtle to human?" Abanak's eyes narrowed.

"Sorta... I mean, I'm still me. I just move differently. It's harder to do the stuff we trained for. I still haven't got the hang of the balance and all..." His voice trailed off, and he squinted down at the lizard in his hand.

Don sat forward. "Mike made that choice almost two years ago, but we've all heard the call to us, these last weeks. And we agreed to come. What's happening out here, Abanak?"

But the man still stared at Mike's browned face and narrowed build. "Such a choice you made. Don't you know your lives and forms belong to a greater will?" he demanded. "Changing from the path you were given means changing the destiny of many, not just yourself. It's selfishness to reject your fate!"

Mike looked at him sharply, sweat standing in beads on his face.

"Abanak," Raph cut in, "_what's _going on out here?"

With an effort, Abanak pulled his gaze from Mike back to the Turtles. He huffed out his breath, composing his expression back into calmness.

"You are here," he said quietly, "because the Great Turtle has need of his children."

The fire crackled in their silence.

"Oh, wow! What an incredible insight!" Mike broke out. "You get that from a peyote dream? Months of meditation? Communing with the far-out vibes?" Don reached up to catch Mike's wrist, stopping the psychedelic motions Mike was making mid-wave. Mike shrugged him off. "Come on, man, tell us something we don't know."

Abanak got to his feet, setting his drained mug and crumb-strewn plate aside. "Thank you for the meal," he said. "The path lies this way."

He stood, walked to the trees, and waited with his back to them. He seemed to be..._listening. _

Muttering, Raph snatched up his pack and started breaking camp. "We've come this far looking for trouble. Let's go get it," he said.

Leo wasn't convinced yet; Mike could tell that much from his stance when he stood – one foot forward, the other angling toward his brother. "Abanak. What is your part in all of this?" he called.

"I do not know. But this is the way to the source of the voice that calls. Fight it, and you'll wander endlessly, until you lose your minds in this jungle."

Mike cursed under his breath. He felt as though the jungle was crowding in, closing like the jaws of a trap. "How would _he_ know? This can't be right."

But Don shrugged. "It can't hurt, guys," he said. "We'd feel it if we get off track."

After a moment, Leo nodded and joined the other Turtles, packing what was left of their camp. Reluctantly, Mike began kicking dirt on the fire. In less than a minute, the four stood together in the center of the campsite. Leo swept them with his eyes, then nodded again.

They walked to the clearing's border. "We're ready," Leo said.

But Abanak turned and pushed an open hand against Mike's chest, forcing him back a step.

"You chose to be human, to abandon your reptile blood," Abanak said. "The Great Turtle is angered. He no longer has need of you. You should leave."

Mike felt his pulse racing.

_Rejected? Already?? _

"No way," he shouted. "Come on, he wouldn't just call me out of New York and into this weirdo prehistoric jungle to say 'oh, sorry, guess you're not what I was looking for after all' — "

"He doesn't want you," Abanak said firmly. "Get as far away from here as possible."

The words fell like blows.

"You're wrong!" Mike snarled. "How would you know what the Great Turtle wants?"

Unbidden, memories of the hellish weeks of alterations he'd gone through rose in his mind. One of the thoughts that had kept him alive, he remembered, was wanting to show his brothers it was possible. They would see how incredible it was to change in this way, stop protesting, and join him in the world above. Mike had even thought of himself as a sort of noble guinea pig, braving the experiment to make the treatments easier for the others when they came.

How would the Great Turtle have felt about _that_? he wondered now. Angry enough to call him out here just long enough to wreak some kind of vengeance? Or had their ancestor not known about the change until now, when Mike had arrived, in the flesh? It wasn't as if becoming human had transformed Mike's spirit...

Those hopes of his hadn't worked out, anyway. Sure, he'd gained all the opportunities and friendships and "normality" the Turtles had dreamed of, growing up. But he'd lost his family for it ... and quickly learned how meaningless all the old dreams were, without them.

And so the time apart had gone.

He lowered his head. "I'm not leaving my brothers," he hissed.

"It would be your death sentence. You've destroyed your heritage; there's nothing for you here."

Mike squared his shoulders, met Abanak's deep eyes with a cold stare, and waited for the others' support.

After a moment, Leo reached over and unhooked their bag of cooking gear from Mike's pack.

_What the – _

"Sorry, Mike," Don said. "He's...probably right. It'd be safer for you to go." Don ducked his head and followed as Abanak started moving down the dark trail. Raph, too, avoided looking at his brother, scanning the twisted trees around them as he and Leo fell in.

Mike clenched his fists and his teeth. "Aw, piss on you guys!" he shouted after them, the old hurts boiling. "I told you I only changed what was outside!" They kept walking. "If that doesn't make me good enough for you anymore, well – to hell with you!" he yelled.

Mike bloodied the knuckles of one hand against the nearest tree as the others disappeared beyond a massive fern. But Leo paused.

Over his shoulder, he answered: "Hell's right here."

As Leo pushed the huge fern leaves aside, something moved a little in Mike's palm. He looked down and choked, horrified, at the half-crushed lizard squirming against his thumb.

Mike gritted his teeth and closed the hand again, crying out his rage as he crushed out her suffering.

_Alone..._

For the first few hours, Mike hiked resolutely back through the strange-limbed jungle, waiting for whatever powers controlled the place to relent and let him back into the familiar world of his time. His mind turned Abanak's words over and over as he walked through the dark trees: "The Great Turtle has no need of you...It's selfish to reject your fate...Fight it and you'll lose your minds." In the gloom beneath the trees, he kept seeing Leo's face as he took Mike's gear away. His brother had worn a focused, inward expression, as though the human formerly known as Michaelangelo had already been forgotten – a piece of troublesome equipment easily left behind.

Eventually, heat, exhaustion and the grim reality of a spiky, stalked palm with purple leaves and a web-winged thing hunched at the fork of its branches – just visible against the lightening pre-dawn sky – brought him to a halt. Mike dropped slowly to his haunches on the dark soil of the trail, balancing himself with one hand flat on the hot, moist ground. His hiking boots creaked with the dampness.

"Can't get out..." he groaned, slapping one of the buzzing flies collecting on his skin. "Guess I gotta wait for you guys to finish your adventure again."

He scouted for a place to make camp, set his things out and unrolled his blankets. Lying down, he pulled an extra shirt over his head to shut out the bugs and the whole awful, ancient, stupid jungle.

For a long time, he lay awake as the light grew strong, listening to the strange noises of the trees, wishing to be anywhere and anyone away from where he was. Eventually, with the hazy sun slipping above the trees, he closed his eyes, their lashes tickled by the shirt's thin fabric, and hoped he wouldn't dream.

As Abanak led the way down the starlit trail, Leo wanted it all to be simple again: the four Turtles on a quest.

_It'll never be that way again, _he reminded himself sullenly. _And it's not our decision…he's not welcome here anymore. Mike made his own decision about that._

Still, he couldn't quite ignore the tiny voice in the back of his mind that wailed and protested at abandoning his brother. He simply spent the rest of the night trying.

He also watched his brothers. Don walked closely with Abanak, speaking quietly while observing their surroundings for potential trouble. Leo didn't try to listen in. If Don learned anything important, he'd share. You could trust Don. Give him a problem and he'd work at it and study it and worry about it until a solution was found. Then he'd pass on what he'd learned (sometimes ad nauseum), and move on to the next challenge.

Logical. Steady. Reliable. No surprises.

Raphael, on rear guard, was predictable, too. Leo had grown to know exactly what situations would bring out the storm in that brother...and how to predict within an hour of when Raph would return, subdued, to plug back in with those he loved.

Not like Mike.

He could never tell anything with Mike. If Don's promises were carved in stone, Leo once told April, Mike's were scribbled in breeze-tossed beach sand.

Except in training, or on a mission. Then you could count on him for anything. There was something almost magic about the way Mike could make things just _work_, as though he'd packed a handful of luck alongside the shuriken and lockpicks and climbing claws in his gear.

Nothing ever just _worked_, since he'd gone.

But Leo could still count on Don, and he could still, storms aside, count on Raphael. Right now, any brewing thunder was firmly under that brother's formidable control. Glancing back, he could tell by the set of Raph's shoulders how determined he was to defend the Turtles against whatever horrors might come out of the warped trees at them. His brother was centered, vigilant, ready.

Leo knew what made him so focused. Raphael feared the dreams far worse than any mammal-thing...

When Abanak called a halt at dawn, Leo unrolled his blanket beside Don's to slip into field-sleep gratefully enough. From a shallow cat nap, he rose to wakefulness enough to register the low voices of Abanak and his brother on the far side of camp.

_But what could Raph have to talk about with Abanak? _he wondered —

— and then the bottom fell out of his light, half-conscious drift.

_The Great Turtle comes like a ship in the night_

_upon a swimmer lost in dark seas._

_Silent. _

_Shining._

_Overwhelming._

_Leo felt the loss-sorrows of his soul well up _

_in response to the kindred ache of the One approaching._

_He opened his mouth to cry and found _

_the notes drowned _

_in the tonguing of the Great Turtle,_

_in the many millennia of grieving, _

_in the mourning of the species,_

_his own longing a single wave _

_in the all-encompassing ocean._

Miles away, a shadow, born from the dust of bones and foul, decayed fur, began to feed.

"You ever see that leech again?" Raph asked, pausing in the circuit of his watch.

"No." The man who had once saved him jiggled his knife blade a further inch, parting more hairy bark from a fallen limb he'd chosen for a walking staff. "But I felt him. One facet of the whole being of the River, enjoying the water and the moonlight, the matings and the feedings. But always, always hungry for another taste of that sweet, tangy, tainted Turtle blood."

Raph smirked, remembering clamping down with tiny jaws on that murdering creature himself. "I'm kinda keen on it, myself," he said. He glanced up, then back to the shadows among the trees. The morning sun was still there.

No fog.

No turtle-shaped clouds.

No trouble.

Except...

"Don't worry, Raphael," Abanak said. "The leech fell back into the collective being of the River long ago. While you walk free – to put all that wonderful mutagen of yours to good use."

A chill ran down his arms. _Wonderful mutagen._ The kind of line a mad scientist would use...or anyone blind to how the world really worked. Nothing was ever _just_ wonderful.

Raph tapped the knob of one sai with a thumb. "You didn't sound too thrilled about Mike putting his mutagen to use, taking it to the next level."

The blade stopped in its work for a moment, then continued. "He violated the blood it swims in," Abanak said.

The chill turned hot. "You sound like Leo."

"Do I?" Abanak thought about it. "It would make sense. He is the most connected to the Great Turtle, and thus, to me."

A white bloom of spit landed in the sharp grass at his side. Raph cracked his knuckles, teeth bared, and stalked off along the perimeter, taking the long way around.

When he returned, Abanak rose to his feet, the unfinished staff set behind him.

"I have offended you. I am sorry."

The Turtle glared. "What are you doing out here, Abanak? Where are you trying to take us, out here?" he demanded.

Abanak's shoulders squared. "To wherever the Great Turtle will reveal himself to us...and explain our dreams."

"Hunh." Raph squinted at the man, whose dark eyes flashed in the sun. "Sounds like you're just as lost as the rest of us."

Abanak looked away, and the shoulders fell. "Some years...more than you know."

A silence stretched between them. Raph could hear Don's snores, a few yards away. "Thinking of a job change?" he guessed.

The man closed his eyes where he stood.

"But you can't, can you?" Raph pressed. "What would happen to the River? And all that live in and around it, the ones you're supposed to protect?"

"I don't know."

Raph felt the chill return. "Abanak – what's happening to them _right now_? I mean, you're not there, at that Source place we left you. So who's watching the fort?"

"It would seem," Abanak said slowly, "that she no longer has need of a guide."

The Turtle squinted.

Abanak bent and picked up the staff, his fingers running up and down the exposed wood. "For years, things were blissful," he began. "The River and I were as one being, and that was enough. And then, one day, it no longer was. I became like a fallen branch the current works free: drifting, then eddying, then sent to wash upon the shore. Disengaged, discharged, disenchanted. Enchanted...yes...the enchantment fell away."

Raphael waited.

"She has no need of me anymore. If she ever did. I wonder if I was anything more than another leech to her? I stayed by the source a long, long while, trying to change myself back into what she wanted. Nothing worked. And as the weeks went by...the months...I began to change again, as I hadn't while we were one." Abanak reached up and dragged at his ponytail. "My hair greyed. I suffered in the cold and burnt in the sun. My body hungered again, and it seemed that even the River could not quench my thirst. Yet still I clung...hoping she would turn."

Somewhere behind them, Leo moaned. Raph jerked around, scanning the sun-drenched clearing for trouble. One of his brothers cried out and he started forward, but Abanak caught his arm.

"Wait – they are dreaming. Disturb them now and you could steal the very message we seek."

Raph trembled.

"Can't you feel it, my friend? The sweetness of the energies?"

The Turtle felt _something_, prickling like goosebumps, but leaving him warm. "Abanak," he said, "I cannot begin to express just how much these whatever-they-ares are NOT sweet."

It was Abanak's turn to squint. "You reject the spirit?"

Raph ignored him, but didn't go to his brothers. He only watched – intensely – Leo's tossing form and Don talking into the air, as though trying to protect them with just his gaze.

"Raphael... If I may ask... You defend Michaelangelo for his choice. Why did you not join him in discarding your turtle heritage?"

"Not for lack of wantin' it," Raphael muttered, after a minute. "Mike about killed me before he left, going on about the freedom, and the people, and the sunshine, and the not-always-hiding.

"But you know...it took me near 20 years to learn not to hate this body and this life. To really get comfortable in this skin. When it came right down to it, I'd worked so hard, it didn't seem right to up and change.

"And besides...there was Leo."

Abanak followed his gaze back to the other Turtles. Leonardo had thrashed over and jammed himself face-down into the ground. One hand was slowly digging a furrow through the sharp-bladed grass. Don, too, lay rigid, his sleep-thickened words tight now, as though it hurt to speak. Abanak laid a restraining hand on Raphael's shoulder.

"They'll be all right," he assured. "What was it about Leonardo that made you stay?"

Raph set his jaw.

"Leo...needs us. More than Mike ever has."


	4. Chapter III Growing Pains

**III. Growing Pains**

_Splash_.

_The spirit of the jungle plunged deep, seeping into Mike's memories, riding their connections until the buried scenes rose and swelled, bursting their shells of protection. _

_The waves of his experience carried, like sound through water, across the prehistoric landscape, touching the minds of other beings, sprinkling their senses or soaking their own sleeping minds with the events of his life. _

_And in the deepest core of the forest, one cold shadow grasped at the passing drift, and it sucked at the drops with triumph. _

Mike was returning to the tunnels, stepping through the hidden access they'd cut in the basement of April and Casey's apartment building, when he heard the door to their friends' kitchen creak open.

"Mike? You still here?"

"Yeah, April?" He closed the hatch again and came to the bottom of the stairs.

April stood above, waiting for him. "Come on up here for a minute, will you?" she asked.

Something about her voice made him nervous, enough that he checked for possible sneak attacks when he reached the top. But the kitchen was empty, two chairs pulled out and a kettle rattling on the stove.

He shrugged off the bout of nerves, taking one of the seats and resting his carapace against its curved wooden back. _It's just the stress of telling everybody_, he decided. Less than an hour ago, he'd finally let his family know about the three young geneticists he'd met that winter and the plans they'd begun to form.

The conversation hadn't gone well.

April stood at the stove with her back to him, pouring steaming water into a warped clay teapot the Turtles had known since infancy. The bulb above the range cast the only light – Casey had left for his evening job at a local hockey rink, busy now with kids on spring break, and Mike's brothers had scattered to their own activities. The apartment was so quiet, he could hear Shadow's soft adolescent snores coming from her bedroom.

He waited as April brewed green tea. She served him; they bowed, then drank in silence, the time-honored ritual creating a sacred space between them.

April leaned forward comfortably, cupping her small, round mug in her hands. "I always loved this pot," she said, gazing at it. The old piece squatted, brown and ugly, on the turtle-shaped trivet Shadow had made from neon Play-Doh in second grade.

"Splinter once told us it belonged to a friend of Master Yoshi's," Mike said. "I guess you could say it's a kind of family heirloom."

April ran a finger down its lumpy side. "The potter who made it...must have been some kind of genius," she said. April traced up again to the misshapen top, then lifted the lid by its odd-angled handle. Turning it over, she revealed an exquisite inner glaze of deep, layered blue, beaded now with steam, and etched with graceful Japanese characters in gold filigree.

"Perfection," they read together.

April replaced it, turning the lid until it fit its lopsided hole again.

"Mike," she said. "This pot is you."

He set his teacup down hard, tea sloshing onto the table, and shoved at his forehead with the heel of one green hand. "Ape – " he began.

"Answer me something," she interrupted. "Are you doing this because of Master Splinter?"

He looked up with eyes wide. "What? You mean, because he died last fall?"

She nodded.

"No, April. Come on! It's like I tried to tell the guys – you heard me, tonight – this is the chance we've been dreaming of all our lives! The chance to walk above ground, the chance to really know people, to – to get a _job_, to go to the friggin' _grocery store_. How can they not want this?"

"Mike," she said, making a calming motion, her palm down.

"April, this is so important, to all of us! You think I'd do this just 'cause I miss Master Splinter? I know it's not been long... I can't help the timing. I wish I'd met them sooner, lots sooner – maybe they could have helped him live longer. Maybe, even, he could have become human, too!"

When he gestured, the cup went over. April snatched it from the air as it rolled off the side of the table.

"Oh, geeze," he cried softly, trying to catch the spilling tea with his hands.

She left the cup in the sink and returned with a dish towel, wordlessly making him sit back as she washed and then dried the tabletop and floor.

When she had finished, April took her seat across from him and pushed the pot, and her half-drained cup, aside. She took his hands in both of hers and looked deep into his damp eyes.

"Michaelangelo," she said, "you are my brother. Whatever decision you make, I will stand behind. But please, make sure...make absolutely certain...you know what you're choosing. And why you're choosing it." She squeezed his limp fingers and looked at him for another long minute. "Don't let this destroy you."

The geneticists vowed – in exchange for the knowledge potential present in Mike's body – to honor his requests for secrecy along with his quest for becoming human.

David, Leslie and Pathy ­were all students in the cellular and molecular biology program based at New York University's Institute of Graduate Biomedical Sciences. With the help of some innovative thesis proposals, they'd secured experimental research equipment for their project in a laboratory in the quieter north wing of the Sackler Institute.

The First Avenue complex overlooked the East River, just off Midtown. The best part of the location, Mike told them, was its convenience. Were anyone to find out what they were really attempting, all they'd have to do is walk a block south for a stay at the infamous Bellevue mental hospital.

For months, they prepared. Mike spent much of his time donating tissues and learning all he could about biogenetics. The rest he spent hiding in various utility rooms and access conduits to catch up on sleep. He never wore his mask or leather wraps or weapons to the school, determined not to share any clues to his identity – and not to frighten them with hints of his abilities in violence. Once a week or so, he made the challenging journey out of the complex and back across the city to visit and train with his family – and stock up on food for the next days.

The process itself would be simple enough, his team told him: a matter of introducing enough radiation to reawaken the bundled mutagenic coding woven into his cells, and the proper chemotherapy to direct the changes it wrought. Over the course of about six months, they said, the activated genetic code would expand and replicate from cell to cell, switching out more and more of his original "turtle" DNA for human gene patterns. The more old cells died, the more the process would accelerate, as they were replaced by the millions of new, human-dominant ones generated by his body each day.

Eventually, they told him, he'd settle into "fully effectuated mutation status" – and achieve his dream.

"It's all just lying in wait inside there," Pathy told him early on, scooting aside so Mike could peer at one of his own blood specimens through her microscope lens. "Your chromosome sets match the human genome perfectly in every sample we've compared. Except that you've also got a bunch of genes, mostly regressive to the human set, that are just like every other pond turtle's swimming around out there. What we've got to do is re-activate that awesome mutagen in your system so it can force the sections that haven't become human-dominant to go the rest of the way."

"And then what happens?" he asked, adjusting the lens focus and squinting at the glistening red cells.

"And then, we stop the radiation and chemo, and let the mutagen go dormant again. And THEN," she continued, running her fingers through her thick, black curls, "we start figuring out how to replicate the mutagen and get it to help people with damaged limbs or birth defects or tumors, so they can get healed."

Mike grinned. "Gonna save the world," he told the cells on the slide.

"Yep," Pathy said. "And pay off all our loans, and start our own clinics, and go on talk shows..."

"And I'll go downtown and stand in the middle of Times Square and yell at the top of my lungs: 'I LOVE NEW YORK!'" Mike jumped up and spun the chair out of the way. "I'll go to a Mets game. I'll ride across the Brooklyn Bridge on a bike. I'll go to the Museum of Natural History and spend three hours in every room. I'll buy ice cream at a stand. I'll walk through Central Park in the daytime and – and sunbathe!"

A tall man with blond hair walked into the laboratory and the back of the chair, which had rolled almost to the door. "There's just one problem," he said, carefully disentangling himself and pushing it aside. "Unless you go public about your past, Mike...you're going to be considered an illegal alien and stuck behind bars until they can figure out what they want to do with you."

The Turtle went still and shook his head. "No way do we go public, David. They'll just stick me in a lab – no offense – for the rest of my life. Besides, I already told you guys. I've got enemies."

Pathy sighed. "So the talk shows, maybe not so much."

"Leslie said she had an idea, though. Right, Les?" Mike looked expectantly at the other woman in the room, who sat hunched in front of a pair of monitors, scrolling through scans of cells and data streams that made his eyes cross.

"Amnesia," she said, without pausing in her work. "Supposedly from a bad interaction of pharmaceuticals. We bring you uptown, leave you with some Salvation Army clothes. And it's tabula rasa time. No name, no origin. You'll have to practice; we'll coach you on how to beat the tests they give to determine if you're faking. Hopefully, they won't put you under an MRI. I haven't found a way we can fake those, yet."

Mike sank back against the lab table, tapping his cheek. "Huh. It'll be like that episode of _The Saint_. 'The Blonde Who Lost Her Head.'"

"What?" asked Pathy, going back to her microscope.

"Oh, when I was little, there was this radio station in Queens that aired re-runs of a crime show from the '50s called 'The Saint,' with Vincent Price. Me and my b—" he caught himself. "My teddy bear," he amended with a sheepish grin he hoped they'd mistake for benign embarrassment, "used to listen to it all the time. And this one episode was about a killer who faked amnesia. Not that I'm a killer or anything." Mike showed his teeth. "Rrgh," he said, making little clawing motions in the air.

As Pathy giggled, Leslie turned and raised a brow at him. "Like I said. You'll have to practice."

And they had, training him on just how much to "remember" or not on basic memory tests, creating an imaginary history to fall back on and throw investigators off the trail, and viewing footage of actual amnesiacs to help make things plausible. He made them all laugh, even Leslie, with his impressions of the doctors on those videos, and the wordplays he spun off the flashcards and scenarios they prepped for him.

But he never, ever, breathed a word about there being others like himself, or hinted at having anyone but enemies in the outside world.

In early May, the ones he'd protected gathered with him in Casey and April's living room for the last time.

They waited silently through his description of the procedure.

"It'll be six months in the lab," Mike finished. "And then however long it takes to get picked up and tested and squared away and cleared to start a new life. I'll get word to you as soon as it's safe."

Shadow got up and hugged him hard. "I don't want you to do it," she said into his shoulder.

For awhile, no one else spoke or moved.

Finally, Leo stood up.

"If there's trouble, don't look for us," he said, his voice as chilly as the late spring evening outside. "You brought this on your own head."

"Leo!" April snapped from the doorway.

"I'm not risking the rest of us because _he_ walked into government central and threw his life away!" Leo stepped close to Mike in a stare-down across Shadow's back. "If these friends of yours sell you out, you do what has to be done to end it," he hissed. "You understand?"

"You're talking about killing these people?" Casey said, putting a hand on his trembling wife.

"Kill whoever's putting us at risk," Leo said deliberately.

Raph got to his feet then, too. "He's talking about seppuku, Casey. Suicide. Isn't that what you're sayin', Leo?"

"He's dead to us, anyway," Leo spat.

Mike's expression went anguished over Shadow's shoulder, and his shoulders sagged under his brother's glare.

But after a moment, one corner of his mouth twisted up into a half-grin. "Ya dead to me," he parroted in a sharp accent. "Go an' toss yaself offa tha Brooklyn Bridge, why don'tcha?"

He lunged suddenly at Leo, clutching Shadow's clinging form to his side. "I hate you!" he snarled as she began to sob. "You'll never get it! You'll never get why this is the best thing that could have happened to us! I hope when I get done with this I never see you again!"

"You _won't_ see me again! We're getting out of here before your 'helpful scientists' come to take us in, too!" Leo spun and pointed at April and Casey. "You three should leave with us. You won't let me stop Mike from going, but I won't allow his selfishness to take you down!"

"We're staying," April answered simply.

"Can't give up the control, can ya, Leo?" Mike taunted. "That's what this is all about, isn't it? You just can't stand the thought of not riding herd on your little brother anymore!"

"Get out!" Leo shouted. "If you're gonna do this, get out, before I – "

Shadow yanked around and slapped Leo, hard. "Leave him alone!" she cried. "He just wants to be free!"

Leo held his cheek, stunned.

"Geeze, Shad," Mike whispered.

She pulled away and went to stand in the arms of her parents.

"Don't do this, Mike," Don pleaded from the couch, his head low in his hands.

Mike let out a shaky breath. His voice was quiet when he spoke again, almost a whisper. "I have to," he told them. "Can't you see?" He walked to the window, its curtains closed against prying eyes, and pressed his palm against the heavy fabric. "I want to stand in the light. I want to talk with those people out there, be in their world, be part of that crowd beyond this window."

Raph closed his eyes.

"Hell, Mikey. Why do you want to leave us so bad?" Casey asked.

"I don't want to leave you!" Mike turned back to Leo, who gripped his own arms now. "But I guess I have to for awhile."

The room fell quiet, except for Shadow's muffled sobs.

"Go do what you want," Leo said bitterly, trembling before the urn of Splinter's ashes in its mantel-top shrine. "You've already destroyed this circle."

And that was the end.

The worst part was that his brother was right. There was, in fact, trouble.

Just not the kind Leo had predicted.

The team had set up, under Mike's direction, a false wall that hid a narrow chamber, just large enough for a "borrowed" hospital bed, the necessary equipment and a stack of about 50 secondhand CDs, books and movies he "couldn't go six months without." The plan was for the students to provide twice-daily rounds of chemical therapies in conjunction with his radiation treatment, stopping in whenever possible to monitor for unexpected interactions or side effects. As for the necessary radiation... Sneaking into the school's highly secure radiation lab and draining massive amounts of electrical resources every day for months was out of the question. Pathy was the one who hit on the idea of implants. Used in rare cases to treat cancer, the radio isotopic capsules could be surgically installed every two weeks and left to gradually release a radioactive solution into his system. Once in his bloodstream, it would interact with the chemotherapy medicines, triggering the genetic mutation process, with fresh implants coming whenever the capsules neared the end of their 15-day cycles.

"It's likely you'll get sick at first," Pathy had informed him. "Really sick. And on this accelerated course, it'll probably hurt for awhile when your bones start to shift and change. Are you sure we can't extend it beyond just half a year, at least to nine months? I know you said a year is way too long, but...doing it in half that time is really going to stress your body."

Mike shook his head. "I can handle it," he said. "It's just growing pains. What I can't handle is the thought of being cooped up in that room for one second longer than I have to be. Six months is plenty long enough, thanks. I'll take extra-strength aspirin and watch Bruce Lee flicks for distraction if it hurts."

She raised her brows.

"I'll be fine," he insisted. "Look, if it gets bad, I promise I'll say something, and we can back off the dosages – all the way to your year, if we have to. Okay? I promise!"

They'd agreed, reluctantly.

On his last night of freedom, Mike left the debacle at the apartment and went to his brothers' tunnel base, where he'd spent so little time for the past few months. He stood in the chamber that had been his bedroom and closed his eyes, for a long while. Then he removed his headband, his elbow pads, his knee pads and wristbands for the last time. He laid his nunchaku atop them in his wooden gear box. He shook out his blankets, lay them back upon the stained futon pad that rested on a Dumpster-rescued tatami mat, and rolled the bedding up to the wall. He padded another box with extra gear and costumes, then swept in the candles and trinkets and mementos from his bookshelf, stacked the box on top of the one with his gear, and piled his remaining books, games and notepads atop the whole.

He tore his art and posters off the walls and crushed them into the trash, fistful after fistful.

He resisted the urge to set a match to it all.

Later, amid the steam vents atop the university building, he watched the first orange etches of sunrise creep up the horizon.

"Gonna miss you," he whispered, finally, to the sky. "See ya in October."

And that was done.

They started the process a few hours later, without ceremony, administering local anesthesia as the first implant went in. Leslie fitted it into place just beneath his upper left plastron, below the point where his clavicle joint merged into the shell.

"Good veins," David observed, tapping Mike's inner arm as they plugged in the first chemo I.V.

"For the moment," he mumbled. "Ouch. Hey, when do I get the tapioca pudding?"

"After the nausea sets in," David said.

He was right.

Pathy sat with Mike the whole first night, jotting down notes whenever he woke long enough to give a report – or throw up. The first three days weren't _so_ bad; Mike spent much of his time sneaking out to help in the lab between bouts of nausea and sessions on the I.V. His readings were good. The blood tests showed he had healthy tolerance of the chemo drugs, and a few of his cell samples demonstrated "promising variance in mitosis activity," Leslie said.

"The challenge," she explained again, "is most radiation and chemotherapy research is geared toward the suppression of cellular division through genetic disruption in cancerous tumors – in other words, destroying cells and keeping them from making more. Our goal in re-awakening your mutagen and triggering human chromosome dominance requires the complete opposite effect: genetic stimulation and replication. Now get back in bed."

"We're building the car as we drive it down the highway," Pathy translated, walking him back through the disguised door to his hidden room.

Mike nodded, as Leslie followed to make sure he stayed this time. "Doesn't have to be a Ferrari," he told them, climbing back onto the hospital bed they'd "borrowed" from storage, and stuck his tongue out at Leslie. "Just so long as it gets us there."

"Oh, it'll get us there, one way or another," she said, her expression grim.

On the third night, he woke to fierce cramps throughout his abdomen. David adjusted the I.V. drip as Mike curled, fingers streaking down his plastron against the pain. "Hang in there," David kept repeating as the Turtle eventually retched, again and again.

Things went downhill from there. On the fourth and fifth days, the cramps spread throughout his body. He stopped trying to sneak out of his tiny room. Leslie and Pathy scrambled to adjust the medications, adding anti-nausea measures and a medicine they said would reduce the swelling in his limbs.

On the fifth night, Pathy woke him with a cry of fear when he rolled over. "What is it?" he croaked through a throat raw, they said, not from the vomiting so much as radiation-related epithelial damage.

"It's – it's nothing," she tried to say.

He turned his head, waited for the world to stop spinning quite so hard, and opened his eyes. About 30 scutes from his carapace lay on the damp sheet; some translucent, yellow and cracked where he'd lain on them, others thick and ragged on the edges. "Hey, that's a good sign, right doc?" he asked.

"Not...not so soon..." she whispered.

He sighed, frowning at the fallen plates.

It took a seizure for them to realize his potassium levels had dropped dangerously low. He lay panting in its aftermath, every muscle screaming from being super-strained, and thought of what Leo must have felt like the Christmas Eve night after Shredder nearly killed him.

"I'll survive this," Mike thought, but it hurt too much to speak.

By the end of the first week, his shell had flaked mostly away, leaving a thick, ridged, callous-like surface, bleeding in parts and hideously sensitive. Mike lay on his side whenever they let him, and just nodded when they offered him Vicodin against the pain.

"You've advanced way too far for this stage," Leslie told him, her voice sharp. "You shouldn't have lost the shell for at least two months."

"What's wrong?" he whispered, fighting the urge to say, _I'm sorry_.

"The mutagen," she said. "It reacted to the radiation much more independently than we expected. We're going to have to replace the implant with a lesser dosage."

He gritted his teeth as the instruments dug out the blood-stained pod and slid another into its place.

Over the next days, _everything_ started changing too fast.

His fingers hummed with separating nerve endings. He felt his arm and leg bones eroding into thinness and his ribs parting, one by one, into bent blades of fire in his chest. On the ninth day, he screamed into his pillow for hour after hour as they cleared his system for stronger pain drugs. They finally plunged his transforming hands and feet into ice water for relief. David stood at Mike's head, wiping the sweat from the Turtle's thinning brows as Mike's teeth ground against each other. "It's kinda neat the way you can practically watch the bones dividing," he offered lamely.

Mike squeezed his eyes shut, hard, before resuming his wide-eyed watch of the ceiling. He was reciting, in his head, every kata he'd ever learned, in alphabetical order.

It didn't help much.

As soon as it was safe, they started the Percoset.

It didn't help much, either.

On day 12, Leslie conducted emergency surgery, removing a third of Mike's teeth – too many, suddenly, for his shrinking jaws. "Not supposed to happen for four and a half months," she snapped around the scalpel clamped between her teeth.

He didn't bother trying to reply.

They gave Mike saline that day and the next, to replace some of the salt leaking near-constantly from his eyes.

Pathy and David grew haggard with exhaustion.

His heels shrank. Leslie measured.

"This was...a lot easier...when I was an infant," he managed once.

David removed the implant at the start of the third week, long before it expired. They didn't replace it. "We should have stopped it sooner," Leslie apologized.

The eyes in the fading-green face flickered a little.

Later that week, his fingers and toes parted from the tips down, leaving lines of scarring down their insides. His tail narrowed, fused to his body, disappeared. Ultrasounds confirmed the shifting of his vertebrae and ribs, as his ears budded and the landscape of Mike's nose narrowed and his lips bloomed into sight.

He'd forgotten what it was to move without pain, to breathe without pain, to exist without the desire to vomit and to scream.

When they offered morphine, he nodded again.

They wouldn't tell him if he was going to die.

"Leo!" he howled once, long and low.

"Who's Leo, baby?" Pathy asked, stroking the mottled skin of his arm.

He stopped talking altogether.

His team adopted the mechanical resignation of battle-weary fighters, coming in for regular shifts of four hours each, going through the motions, catching up on sleep. They took samples, changed his I.V.s and documented the data from his monitors as though he, too, had become a machine. He sensed the withdrawal, the weariness of the deathwatch.

The white walls of his room descended and scrawled through a scroll of days and nights. "Let me go," he began to beg. "Please. I'll tell you anything you want. Just let me go free."

They reduced the morphine.

In the middle of the fourth week he held down food and could turn over for cleaning without choking back a cry. Mike's skin color settled into a light brown, and downy hair began to sprout all over.

He said he ached from his head to his soul. Pathy understood. His team's eyes came alive again, and actually met his.

In the fifth week, he sat up for times, staring at his alien hands, turning them over and rubbing, gently, the knuckles, the patches of hair, the still-tender fingernails. He squinted out at his bare feet and wiggled them, wincing, then wiggled them again.

Sometimes for hours.

They switched him back to Percoset.

He begged a quarter from David and spent days teaching himself how to "walk" the coin from finger to finger – his favorite sleight-of-hand move as a kid; twice as hard now.

They caught him trying to stand.

Then, trying to sneak into the lab.

"You're gonna get in trouble," Pathy warned him, laughing, when he folded the day's chart into a paper airplane and sailed it over her head. It crashed into his narrow room's wall. "Anyway, here. This should help to keep you occupied."

She'd brought him a mirror. He knew it at once; took it eagerly, almost snatching it from her.

The light went out of his eyes. His new face – pale, a little drawn, hardly showing the fine layer of fuzz his fingertips had already warned him of – stared back at him. They were still his eyes...but framed now with dark eyelashes and lids too thin to believe. He sank backward on the bed, reached up with one hand and traced the brush of an eyebrow, the ridge of a cheekbone. He worked his jaw and felt the dry swell of his bottom lip. The nose stuck from his face like a ship's prow, a wedge of cheese, a knob of off-colored clay.

"You look good," Pathy ventured beside him. "Good-looking, I mean. You could use a little color and feeding up, of course. But – you didn't turn out bad. Really."

His fingers moved to the glass, tapping the cold surface. "Where'd I go?" he whispered. "Who _is_ that?"

Pathy took his chin in her hand and turned his head toward her. "You're Mike," she told him firmly. "You're Mike. You get to be Mike, now, the one you were always meant to be. You're beautiful. And you don't have to hide it anymore."

At the end of the sixth week they handed him clothes from a paper grocery bag. The shoes made his feet hurt, even before they showed him how to tie the laces. He tried not to sway too badly in them. The sweater was grey, a cable-knit that reminded him of the cold winter mornings in Northampton. It felt comfortable over the simple white T-shirt and straight-leg jeans.

They weren't meeting his eyes, again.

"Let's go," David said, tugging a lab coat over Mike's outfit and buttoning it tight.

"Go where?" he asked.

"You should be all right," Leslie said. "The cellular changes stabilized two weeks ago and your system's significantly adapted to the anatomical shifts."

His stomach tumbled. "Wait, what's going on?" Mike caught at Pathy's sleeve as she started to slide open the door of his chamber. "Look at me!"

"They're investigating us," she whispered.

"Path, don't – " David began.

"What?"

Leslie crossed to the door and pushed it closed.

"What's happening?" Mike repeated into the quiet that followed.

Leslie turned to face him. "We used too many painkillers," she said. "Someone finally put two and two – or in this case, three drugs and three students – together. Pathy got the heads up from a friend who sits on the research committee. They're shutting the lab down this afternoon."

Dave leaned against the wall, his head in his hand. "We've got maybe four hours to tear this room down and draw up some fake reports accounting for all the medicines..."

"I'm a fast typer," Pathy assured him, uncertainly.

Mike glanced at his arms, swathed now in clothing but marked, just beneath, with the holes where the needles had fit so often and so long. "I'm sorry..." he whispered.

Leslie slid the door back open and switched off the lights. "We'll work it out," she said. "Besides. It's not your fault. We were the ones who offered the painkillers. You never actually asked."

"You gonna make it?" Pathy asked, squinting at him.

"I guess that...I gotta," he said in the darkness.

Leslie nodded. "He's ready as he's going to be. We need to move him, now."

They hit him up with Percoset, one last time. He walked with them down university hallways he'd never seen, feigning casual purpose, trying to ignore the raw panic whenever other humans passed them. "Not a freak anymore, not a freak anymore," he chanted under his breath. Pathy caught his hand and squeezed it. "Ow," he said.

They put him in the passenger seat of Leslie's car, taking back the lab coat, and then the others stepped away, closing the door on him. He rolled the window down as fast as he could, ignoring the soreness in his untested arm. "David," he said. "Pathy." Leslie started the engine.

They nodded at him, serious, worried...proud. "Thank you," he said finally.

"To new life," David said, raising a palm.

Pathy bit her lip, and smiled around it.

Mike touched his face with his new fingers and felt how his lips curved, pushing up his cheeks, when he returned the smile.

The car engaged and drove away.


	5. Chapter IV In Search of Peace

**IV. In Search Of Peace**

Don opened his eyes. The mid-afternoon sun cast violet rings on a sheaf of clouds above the forest. He breathed.

"So that's how it was," he said.

When he rolled over, he saw Raph bracing himself against a tree, watching him. "Rise and shine."

Don raised a brow. "Mmm. Anything happening?"

"Besides you and Leo havin' nightmares, and Abanak threatening to shine my shell if I tried to wake you from 'em, nada."

"So it was that obvious."

"Yep. You were talkin' up a storm of geek-speak, stuff like protein globules and radiation grays – you weren't talkin' about aliens, were ya? And Leo was just pitchin' fits." Raph pointed to a scatter of blankets beyond the smoldering fire ring. "Looks like he got it a lot worse than you...and now he's bolted."

"Bolted? Where?" Don pushed to his feet.

"Dunno. Disappeared on my watch, too – one minute havin' some kind of bad dream, the next, gone. I'm gonna hear about it."

His brother frowned. "You – didn't dream too, did you?"

"I didn't fall asleep, Donnie!" Raph snapped. "I was on watch. Leo just slipped out like the sneaky bastard he is."

Don shook his head and started looking for their brother's tracks. "I wasn't implying – wait. Where's Abanak?"

Raph rolled his eyes. "Prayin'."

A few minutes later, Don found Leo filling a water pouch at a stream not far from their site.

"Hey," Don said.

"Hey."

"Raph informs me you had a dream."

Leo shrugged, clearing debris from the water filter. "You?"

"Yeah. A long one. About Mike's...procedure. In excruciating detail."

His brother sighed and pulled the bag from the stream, capping it off and turning to face him.

"Gah," Don gasped. Leo's face was scraped raw, and one side of his plastron was streaked a coppery brown – they'd all cleaned enough blood off each other over the years for Don to know what had left the stain. It always took soap and a good scrub to clean it completely off their shells.

Leo held up a hand, showing more scrapes. "Guess I haven't learned to walk through dreams quite so confidently as you," he said wryly. "I wanted out of this one so much I tried to claw my way free."

"Huh." Don walked Leo back to the stream and gave his brother's damaged skin a more thorough cleansing. For awhile, he worked in silence.

"Mike went through a lot to get changed," Don observed.

"That punk tried to compare it to what I went through that Christmas," Leo bit off. "He _chose_ those treatments; I didn't choose what the Foot did to me."

Don snorted. "From what I remember, you said you chased Foot ninjas through Chinatown, on your own, for a full half-hour before they closed the trap."

"It's not the same," Leo said coolly. "And you know why Mike never told us how bad it was? Because he still hoped we might be idiots enough to try it, ourselves. He might as well have lied to us. It's unforgivable."

Scowling, Don dug at a wedge of dirt caught under a break in Leo's skin. "He didn't tell _you_, maybe. He told Raph and me. You just never gave him a chance. But now you know..."

Leo frowned, struggling to relax his jaw as Don prodded around it.

"So," Don continued. "You gonna talk to Mike about what you saw?"

The frown deepened. "Why? He was a fool to do that to himself...to us. And he endangers us to this day." Leo batted at Don's hands, suddenly, pulling away from his ministrations. "Enough, Don. You're making it hurt."

"I know." He grabbed his brother's face more firmly and scrubbed.

Raph smothered a yawn as he watched Donatello disappear into the treeline. _Hope he has more luck with Leo than I've had,_ he thought, and shook his head. The nightmares his brothers apparently suffered through were enough to make him almost glad that he wasn't going to get any sleep himself, but he had to admit that he was tired. Tired of the tension that perpetually radiated from Leo, tired of the quest, tired of… "Tired of this blasted jungle," he said out loud.

He looked around resentfully, made uncomfortable by the realization that he was alone. In the years since their first foray into the strange dream-realm, he'd forgotten a lot of details – the oppressive silence, the strange smell of the ancient trees, the way that sounds seemed to fall dead in the air instead of carrying – but he hadn't forgotten the most important thing: the Adversary preferred to attack them when they were isolated from each other. His fingers traced the worn leather bindings of his favorite weapons, seeking reassurance more than he wanted to admit. If he got taken out of the action now…well, it wasn't likely Mike would come along and find him this time, would he?

Movement at the edge of their campground caught his eye.

He held one sai close to his thigh, ready to strike, as he crept noiselessly over to the disturbance. Abanak's meager pack lay at the base of a tree. The almost-finished walking staff leaned against the rough bark, its raw wood glowing in the shadows –

– and then fell with a muted clatter as something shifted inside the pack.

Raph dropped into a defensive crouch. "What the hell..?" he muttered. He reversed his grip on the sai and poked the blunt pommel at the wiggling lump of…something…inside the battered fabric. The…something…squealed and spun around as it realized the danger, but stayed inside the fragile shelter of the bag.

_Did Abanak pack a squirrel along, or somethin'?_ Raph wondered. He relaxed fractionally. _Not likely. Musta snuck in while I was talkin' to Don…_ He poked at the shifting fabric again, intent on scaring the creature out of the bag and back into the jungle where it belonged.

Angry chittering, and more wriggling, were the only reaction.

Raphael found himself getting annoyed. "I'm doin' you a favor, ya knob!" he said to the scolding lump. "You don't wanna go where we're going."

To his surprise, the creature responded to his voice with an angry hiss. He sat back on his heels and regarded the pack with consternation. "Did you just hiss at me?"

His unseen foe hissed again. And then, surprising him still further, the voice shifted into something lower and more menacing: a growl.

Both sai were out before he could blink. Tension shot through him, coiling him into a tight posture that could easily spring into motion – attack or retreat – as his brain caught up with what his ninja-trained senses had already determined. "That's not a squirrel…"

The bag shifted again. The creature inside it growled, an unmistakable sound of menace. The lump moved closer to the opening.

In a flash, something dark and furry leaped out of the bag and into the overhanging limbs of the tree.

Raph shouted and leaped after it. The dark form scrambled among the branches, alternately growling and chittering. It scolded Raph, threatened him, and retreated only when he was close enough to almost – almost! – get his hands on it. It leaped to the next tree, clutched at the misshapen trunk, and taunted him again.

He gathered himself up and jumped across the narrow space, only to find that his quarry had moved again. Once more, he chased the squirrel-shaped thing through the branches, until it shimmied to the ground and ran to another tree, gibbering and snarling the whole time.

Raphael gave chase, half-noting the distance that he was putting between himself and the campsite. _Wouldn't do ta get lost,_ he told himself grimly_. Leo really would have my shell for that one…_

He had his hands wrapped around the lowest branch of the tree, his eyes fixed on his foe, when the full meaning of it all crashed on him. _It's leading me away…_

Cold, suddenly, in spite of the oppressive heat, he dropped his hands and backed away. In the branches above, the thing chattered and growled even more. It ran out along the branches, just above Raph's head, and taunted him. Raph could almost hear the intelligent malice in the wordless voice.

"Nuh-uh," he told it. "You ain't getting' me that easy." He kept his eyes locked on the malevolent thing as he backed away.

The taunts continued, and ratcheted up. The squirrel-shaped thing danced from foot to foot, seemingly intent on getting Raphael back into the chase. Its cries became more desperate and screechy.

Raphael continued to walk away, eyes on his erstwhile foe. As the distance between them grew, the creature's malevolence began to seem more comic than anything else. Raph wanted to laugh at the frantic tone it took on. "Oh, no, don't be coming out with the 'yo mama' insults to me," he cracked. "'Cause you _know_ I can play that game better'n you…lazy-ass spirit thing, livin' in the jungle 'cause you can't _handle _the real world…"

It screeched once more, a high ululation. The sound sent shivers down the Turtle's neck, but he laughed out loud. "That all you got?!" he called. Then he turned on his heel and waved the creature off, dismissing it. "You got nothing…"

Ears straining for the slightest rustle to indicate that he was being followed, Raph went back to camp.

_Inhale._

_Water: slick and salty on his skin. Thick in the air. Sliding past in the belly of the stream._

_Earth: red on his cheekbones. Deep beneath his crossed legs. Heavy in the distance at the boundaries of the world._

_Air: cut with threads of sweetgrass smoking in the shallow wooden dish at his side. Weighing thicker by the hour. Ominous. _

_A prickle on his bare chest, a hint of energy, the first kiss of coming water. _

_The voice whispered to him of a lost river._

_Abanak exhaled._

The chanting of Abanak's grandmother rose above the crackling of the fire in the center of the lodge, a living, spoken song that carried echoes of generations through the smoky air. Abanak closed his eyes against the angry heat rising inside his chest, growing hotter than the flames that had the circle of boys and men sweating and delirious around him.

Never would his ancestors have had a woman leading this chant.

Never would they have dreamed of becoming so decimated that the only true-blooded Algonquin remaining to perform his shamanic coming-of-age ritual was a female.

He knew he should focus on the imagery: Brother Eagle, walking high on the sky, calling Abanak's spirit to greater heights. Brother Mole, tunneling deep to teach him the ways of patience and growth and renewal from the earth. Father Turtle, bearing them all upon his great, uplifting shell...

Yet all he could feel was the shame of having hardware store two-by-fours holding up the sweat lodge. He hated the stink of the skins that protected them from the November air – they came from stripped roadkill, collected by state troopers for his tribe to dispose of. The men around him wore jeans instead of leggings. And the decorations in their hair and over their shoulders and on their belts were made from plastic buttons and glass beads from the department store in downtown Booders Falls, or pounded disks of metal cut from cans of beans, or red- and purple-dyed feathers from some store-bought children's costume.

He seethed within – so fiercely he half-expected his grandmother to call the ceremony off until he calmed.

But she chanted on, meeting his eyes across the fire with steely focus.

He was the last of the true Algonquin. The last hope for the People.

And the rest of them thought this was just another empty ritual.

"Enough!" Abanak burst to his feet, his head just missing the roof – at 14, he was already too tall for the lodge – and yanked off the blue dress shirt the elders had bought for his entrance into adulthood. He gripped it between his fists, feeling the eyes of the others upon him. They looked surprised, curious. He could almost hear their thoughts: _What will that strange one do now?_

His hands tightened on the shirt as he held it over the fire, speaking in their native tongue

"Enough of the White Man and his rape of our People, of the land and the sky and the water!" he shouted. "I am a man. I will fight him with every hour of my manhood. I will not walk in his footsteps with my head down – I will show him the strength of the Way and its vengeance for those who cause such slaughter!"

The shirt tore in his hands – he ripped it again and again, the sweat standing hot on his skin, the shredded cloth dropping onto the flames in hissing sizzles and ash.

He looked up, and he saw their faces had closed against him.

"You have chosen the easy life..." he said wonderingly. "You've sold yourselves for the White Man's trinkets and empty promises. You don't long for the return of the Way. Will none of you take up the arrows of our ancestors, of our brothers and sisters of the earth?"

The only sounds in the lodge were the greedy flames, hungry for the last strips of cloth caught in his fingers, and the steady chant of his grandmother, coming, it seemed, from another world.

A lost world, from impossibly long ago.

"You're dead already!" he accused. "Dead, though you walk and speak like ones who still breathe! Do none of you listen to the stories? Do none of you see – "

"Abanak! Enough."

He spun. Abanak's uncle, his dead mother's brother-in-law, got to his feet with the help of a polished staff. The man had lost part of a leg two years earlier, fighting in Vietnam. Talking Sparrow wore the chief's pouch now, and his word was law.

"The Way teaches us oneness with all beings," his uncle told him. "It is the way of adaptation, of acceptance, of peace, that we look even into the heart of our enemy – and find ourselves."

Abanak shook his head, trembling despite the baking heat.

"That is the way of death," he said. "I will honor my ancestors, not your foolish 'peace.'"

He swept the lodge with a look of contempt, shook the last pieces of cloth into the eager fire, and jerked the medicine pouch of his childhood free of his neck. It landed in the center of the flames, its leather blackening and curling around the talismans it held: river stones and raccoon-paw bones from his first childhood kill.

"My path will lead to the only true peace: the end of the White Man's reign," he pledged, and walked out.

Abanak yanked his shirt back on and cast an annoyed look at the swarm of gnats and prehistoric mosquitoes that still hovered, hopefully, around him.

"The voice of the Great Turtle himself could be drowned by your buzzing," he complained.

Not that he minded. They helped distract him from the half-remembered sound of his grandmother's chant and the memory of his awkward, impassioned younger self.

Abanak gathered his tools – the carefully harvested herbs, the smoke pot, the stones humming with energy. His path would lead east, that night. He could feel the pull. But when he returned to the camp, it was empty of Turtles. In their absence, he packed, then seated himself to wait, feeling the sweat roll down the back of his neck.

The Turtles have grown, he thought. Raphael still moved like a wolf, but one that has lived many winters and seen many litters mature. The wild edge Abanak remembered had settled and focused into a kind of power that didn't need explosions anymore. The Turtle Donatello moved with more surety, too. He radiated intelligence, yet no longer seemed to fear that which he did not know.

"He has embraced the mysteries," Abanak whispered.

He could remember the feeling when he, too, first abandoned the need for answers, reasons, boxes and definitions for all the wonders that surrounded him. He no longer tried, for instance, to imagine a reason for mosquitoes...

And then there was Leonardo. That Turtle, always close-lipped and centered on his goals, reminded Abanak now of a certain elder from his childhood. She had lost an arm in an accident during the Vermont apple harvest one autumn, and walked the rest of her days with the kind of determination and strain he recognized now in Leonardo.

A leader who had lost a limb.

He frowned, thinking now of Mike. How had that brother changed, beyond becoming human? Abanak thought back. Mike had been the Turtle who delighted most in their adventures with the River. The one to marvel open-mouthed at the waterfall and flower-strewn greenery of the Source. And he was the one to first throw himself at Raph with an overpowering embrace when that Turtle stood in mutant form again.

When Abanak sent the Turtles downriver on a ride of trout-filled waves, he remembered, Mike had reacted with joyful abandon, surfing and playing as though he'd mutated not from a clumsy pond turtle but a leaping dolphin.

Last night, that childlike embrace of life was nowhere to be found. Abanak thought of the way Mike's eyes had watched his brothers from behind and how his mouth had snapped and cursed and bitten off his words. If before he'd bounced through their adventures as a puppy, last night he skulked like a stray dog, hungry for something no alley scraps or sheltering overhang could give.

He could almost feel pity for the former Turtle. But Leonardo was correct – anyone who gave up their birthright had to accept the painful costs.

Just as Abanak had. The River had felt his traitorous longing for the voices of beings who use words, not just songs or howlings. The River had known when he no longer found her _enough_. He recalled, now, the yellow butterfly that had come to rest on his outstretched finger last spring, only to leave him sobbing for the remembered touch of human hands.

The River had let him feel her lack of need, his utter insignificance in the midst of her flowing energies, before allowing this new quest to wash him away.

"To what are you leading me?" he asked the voice.

A mosquito zipped into view, dodged back in a complicated somersault loop, and landed on Abanak's nose.

He muttered, and missed.

Mike spent that morning collecting palm fronds and assembling a shelter at the edge of the clearing. He got artistic, decorating it with thorns and blooms from the trees. Standing back in admiration, he played real estate agent to an imaginary couple.

"It's such a _dahling_ place, look at this authentic use of natchural materials," he quipped. "Just think o' the _atmospheah_."

Mike smirked. No matter how many leaves he wove through the arching limbs, he knew he'd see a little too much "atmospheah" if the humid skies decided to rain.

"I suppose you'd call it...'cozy'?" he asked in falsetto.

"Now, honey," he warned.

"And what kind of _mixed message_ is this? Flowers to lure people in, and thorns to drive them away? Hmph!"

He worked until the heat grew too fierce, then took a siesta, the shelter keeping out at least some of the bugs.

The sun had descended behind the trees by the time he woke and made himself a stew from a dried mix he'd picked up at a camping store. As it thickened over the fire with a strip of Raph's beef jerky for flavoring, he ran through a kickboxing aerobics routine he'd developed for a class he taught Sundays at a fitness center in Greenwich Village. He adjusted moves, hearing the music in his head, and switched the order around. Then back. And then around again.

When dusk settled, he pulled out a notebook and sat close to the fire.

"I could feel Don and Raph, watching me," he wrote, "on the drive up and at the farmhouse, the other evening. And on the trail. And making camp. We've gotten together what, three or four times since I finished mutation? And still, every time, it's like no matter how much they look, they can't believe their eyes. What do they want me to do, strip naked and dance a jig? It wouldn't be so bad if they were figuring out what it would be like, to change. But that'll never happen. All I hear in my head when I catch them looking is: 'How can that be Mike?' or 'How could he do it?' But they don't want to hear it when I try to explain. Raph gets that closed-up expression and Donnie, he stops tinkering and pretends to listen, and all the while he's thinking about my 10 friggin' fingers and how the mutation might affect the, I don't know, the ribonucleic functioning in my liver cells.

"Still, it's a heck of a load better than what Leo does. I don't think he's even once looked me in the eyes. Is it what I represent to him now, what this body represents? – freedom! possibilities! and his little brother not letting him rule anymore?"

Mike paused, looking up to the stars pricking ever clearer through the shifting colors of the sky.

"I miss the City. So much is going on this week...I hope I'm not totally lost in class when I get back. I hope they're doing okay at the shelter without me. I hope Jackie's not mad I had to bail on dinner with her, again."

He thought for a while about the dancer he'd met during a theater class at the community center. Jackie was the latest of several women he'd dated so far. They'd met for a few lunches and even made out in the front of her vintage VW Beetle, a few times. She was the one who first told him he gave out mixed messages, while tossing her brown curls and leaning in for another kiss. She got impatient with his 'forgotten' past, told wild stories about his being a brainwashed prince or a spy trained to rescue girls going mad for chocolate.

He liked her. He really did. He no longer tried to tell himself he was in love.

When he looked back at the page, the sky had grown fully dark and the fire had died so much he could barely make out his words. Mike sighed.

Something lumbered into the clearing beyond the fire.

Something big.

Mike scooted backward into the shadows, feeling his heart thudding against his ribs. He reached for the nunchaku in his belt.

Neither the weapons nor the belt were there, anymore. He cursed and scrambled to the shelter, tore open his pack and hauled the paired sticks out, wincing as he pinched his forefingers between their cold, heavy ends.

A grand snort echoed in the night air, followed by a pounding, scraping sound, like that of a bull pawing the dirt before a charge.

Mike surged out to meet the attacker and abruptly fell back, his legs like water.

The Great Turtle had found him.

With the loss of the food Mike had carried, the Turtles and Abanak started running low on rations that afternoon. Raph kept an eye out for anything edible as they hiked, in case they were stuck in the ancient land longer than they'd planned. They found little of interest and nothing crossed their paths all day.

And then, early in the evening, the jungle simply ended. The four emerged on a narrow, grassy shelf jutting over a chasm to the east. As they gazed past the limbs of a massive, gnarled tree already tilting dangerously over the edge, half its roots dangling free of the cliff, Raph swore.

They'd found the fog.

It roiled, 15 feet below them, obscuring everything. Shadows in the distance, perhaps 200 yards from where they stood, hinted at more jungle on the far side.

"I don't remember anything like this," Donatello said. "You went farther than the rest of us last time, Leo. Did you...?"

Their leader shook his head.

Abanak dropped to his haunches and tugged a handful of loose dirt from the roots at his side. They watched as it sprinkled from his fingers – and, caught in some invisible breeze, swung out and down into the fog. Mists swirled around the offering, then slowly surged toward their wall, curling, murky, a few feet below its edge.

"What is it?" Raph asked, fierce because he already knew the answer.

"Something powerful," Abanak muttered. "Something that's not supposed to be here."

They stood for a minute, taking this in.

"Scouting parties?" Don suggested.

"Not a chance," Leo snapped. "We stay together, now. All of you, understood? Abanak? Raphael?"

Raph didn't even bother to bristle at his brother's tone, he was so relieved. They could all feel it: the animosity below them, the fear and scorn.

They started north, if they could trust the direction of the setting sun. The chasm swept along the sheer cliff edge to their right, the curve tending inward. The further they walked, the more Raph's stomach tightened. Something wasn't right. The curve kept forcing them to the left, westward, back in the direction they had hiked from. He watched the sky darken and tried to ignore the feeling of being trapped on what had somehow become the inside of a circle.

"We should go back," he said, when the gaping canyon forced them in line again with the last rays of the sun, disappearing beyond a shadowy horizon. "Try the other direction."

Leo didn't break pace.

"Leo. Look around you! We crossed this section half an hour ago and it was deep jungle."

Now, a fog-covered gash stood between them and the eastern ridge of the old land.

They'd been cut off.

"What's the plan?" Raph demanded as the others slowed.

"We keep moving," Leo ordered, without sparing them a glance.

Raph stopped, ground his teeth for a minute, then continued silently behind the others.

They continued south. Then east. North, then west again.

An hour passed. The fog did not.

The stars glared above.

Finally, Don slowed to a halt and leaned his head against the top of his bo. "I think, o wise leader, we're going in circles," he observed. "One circle, actually, about 1.5 miles in diameter."

"We keep moving – " Leo repeated, voice strained. "There's got to be a way – "

At that, Raph swung forward and planted himself in front of his brother.

"Enough, Leo." He pointed to the fog. "It's not going anywhere. And we're not getting anywhere. It's time to change what we're doing."

Abanak nodded. "Perhaps it is time we find a way down."

"No," Don said sharply. "The fog's got the advantage right now, after dark. We should go inland first. There's something in there of the Great Turtle...can't you feel it?"

Raph raised his brow at the expression on Leo's face as his brother slowly moved to face the jungle on their left.

It was something like dread.

"All right," Leo whispered. He adjusted his pack, glanced at the others, then back at the forest, his face and stance taking on a look of resolve. "All right," he repeated, more firmly. "Let's go."

Beneath the trees, with the fog's grey reflections behind them, the darkness intensified, hot and shrouding and nearly complete. The Turtles' awareness extended, and they moved deeper into their ninja training, creeping forward step by careful step. Abanak stumbled, walked into a tree, began to panic.

"He can't do this," Don said.

Raph reached for his flashlight, but Leo caught his brother's wrist.

"No," the Turtle said, voice light with relief. "That'll only bring whatever's here down on top of us. We'll wait for morning."

They retreated, pitching camp just inside the tree line from the cliff, and sat watching the fog's occasional heaves. They left their weapons drawn and their bedrolls tied.

"Mike's probably sitting up at the farmhouse right now, chowing on steaks and watching movies on a rented TV," Raph grumbled.

"Yeah. Unless he took off back to the City." Don tossed a chip of bark into the fire. "He could leave us the truck and still take a bus. Being human's got _some_ advantages."

"I had to walk," said Abanak. Don and Raph looked at him. Leo kept his place at the edge of their circle of light, his back to them, watching the starlit fog through the jungle's last trees. "When I came down from the hills," Abanak continued, "I had been gone more than 10 years. I had no money; I could hardly remember how to speak. The first people I saw called the police, so I ran. I hid until dark, then stole clothes from a Laundromat... I even stole food." He trailed off.

"How long has it been?" Don prompted.

"Something like six months. The River sent me away sometime in fall."

"What did you do after that?"

Abanak leaned his chin on one hand. "I wandered for awhile, from camp to camp among the homeless. No one would give me a job, not even sweeping after hours for a few dollars. Some of the old ones called me a 'shiftless Injun' and yelled at me to get out."

Raph spat into the flames. "Some of the old ones should get their heads knocked together," he said.

Abanak chuckled. "They cling to a world that has moved into the past. As do I! There's little place today for those of us who seek the voices in the wind."

Don frowned. "What happened then?" he prompted.

"I found myself heading ever southward, back to the home of my childhood, feeding myself with the money collected from cans and bottles along the way. But when I arrived, the elders of the lodge...had moved indeed into the past. Most had died. Of those who had taken their places, I recognized only a few, playmates from my youth. They welcomed me back, gave me work and a place to stay. For awhile."

Abanak's expression darkened.

"But I made the mistake of telling the story of the River and her rejection. The shaman said I must have abandoned the Way. He convinced the People I had offended the spirits and had to leave, in quest of a new soul."

Raph rolled his shoulders and sent Abanak a dark look. "Sounds familiar," he observed. "Sounds a lot like what you told Mike."

Abanak lowered his brows. "I was merely passing on the message of the Great Turtle."

Raph shrugged and turned back to the fire.

"After my tribe sent me out to wander, his spirit became my only guide," Abanak said.

"But has he led you to your new soul?" Leo asked suddenly, his voice rough with lack of sleep.

They all looked toward the Turtle, his carapace catching the red reflections of the firelight.

Abanak said nothing.

Don turned back, his expression resolved and grim. "Take watch with me, Abanak?"

"All right."

Exhaustion drew Raph toward slumber. He stared at Leo for awhile, who leaned against a tree, rubbing one thumb over a scar on his shoulder, his attention on the fog. Raph would bet a case of Casey's beer that Leo wouldn't even open his bedroll all night, no matter who was taking guard...not with the kind of dreams Don had said they'd gotten the previous evening.

Through half-lidded eyes, he watched as Don set a pot of water beside the fire, pulling on his gear while it boiled. Then Donatello glanced at him, poured two mugs of tea and walked over to hand one to Leo.

Raph closed his eyes and let his weariness take him.

The herbs Don had slipped into their leader's mug sent Leo under, too.


	6. Chapter V Judgment

**V. Judgment**

"I'll drop you off here," Leslie told him, parking the Volvo on a street lined with 1930s-era penthouses. Every few buildings, a market spilled onto the sidewalk with displays of fruit or fish or knotted Polish breads in baskets. Mike stared at the handful of shoppers on the other side of the car window.

But they only bent over the displays, choosing from among the gutted halibut and flounder and cuts of salmon splayed open on the shelves.

"I think I know exactly what those fish feel like..." he said, resisting the urge to duck into the back of the car and pull his sweater over his exposed hands and head.

Leslie pointed. "Park Avenue's two blocks that way. When you reach it, turn left and walk south. There's usually a lot of people out this time of day, heading to the park or the museums, but try not to draw anybody's attention. In about 20 minutes you're going to have another seizure – "

"What?" He jerked his attention back. "How do you – "

"I gave you some pills that will induce one. It'll get you an ambulance and a trip to St. Vincent's. From there, it's up to you."

"No! I can't do another seizure, Leslie – that last one, it was horrible, I nearly – "

"It's too late, Mike," she said, turning in her seat and touching one of his knees through the jeans. "Believe me, this is the easiest way. When you wake up, you'll tell them you don't remember anything...and after a seizure, they're more likely to believe you."

He sank his forehead against the dashboard.

"Mike," she said.

"Nnn."

"I wanted to tell you... You're – you're the bravest man I – ever – "

Leslie turned and placed her hands on the steering wheel. He rotated his head enough to watch her, sideways, as she rearranged her expression. She squared her jaw.

"Better get going," Leslie said. "You don't have much time."

He drew a long, shaky breath.

"Leslie," he began, and realized it was already too much for her. He sighed and unlocked the door. Swung his legs out. When he stood, the world spun in a brilliance of crimson stars. Then settled. He turned and let the door close on his words.

"Thank you, too."

The seizure did, in fact, briefly rob him of his memory. When Mike woke in the ambulance, he panicked – first at the pain, then at the ambulance and EMTs, and, finally, at the nightmare of his human frame and skin. The EMTs had to throw themselves on top of him to hold him down. The driver yanked the ambulance over, hauled his seat belt off and leapt into the back, stabbing some kind of injection into Mike, who fought until he passed out again.

Warned, the hospital made sure his gurney came with restraints. He woke again that night, more coherent, and the battery of questions began.

The nurses were skeptical of his story, but sympathetic.

The police were suspicious until his records check turned up nothing, then washed their hands of him.

The chaplain was supportive, but when the doctors declared Mike healthy, handed over a folder of church tracts and said she'd pray for him.

The social worker thought he was hot and helped Mike get a job at a children's homeless shelter, at least until they could find his family or track down something besides his first name.

"'I think it was '_Mike_'?" she echoed, incredulous. "Only the single most popular first name in U.S. history? Why couldn't you have been something a little easier to track down, like 'Spiro' or 'Remington' or – or 'Adelard'?"

"Adelard?!"

Two weeks after leaving the university, he bought a bike and rented a furnished room, slightly larger than his hidden space in the lab, above a Chinese restaurant in the East Village.

Within days, his coworkers at the shelter had nicknamed him "Pied Piper" for the way the little kids trailed him all through his shifts.

After three months, the social worker told him the agencies had conceded defeat: No records or missing person cases matching his fingerprints or profile could be found. His file had been released, pending further information. Mike pretended dismay and celebrated by cooking Mike's Famous Pasghetti and Neatballs for the kids and crew. He sent a cheery, coded postcard to April from Grand Central Station and signed it "Adelard."

At six months, he had a certified U.S. identification number, a driver's license and a bank account. With that, the shelter director promoted him to assistant director of programming. He signed up for classes at City College. His rented room filled with stacks of books and legal pads covered in his slanted scrawl. He traded a handful of letters with April via post office box and promised, in code, to visit as soon as the coast was clear.

His brothers never added messages to hers.

Mike spent Christmas with the kids, telling them stories about SuperMike, who once rescued a whole orphanage's Christmas by recapturing a hijacked truck full of Lil' Orphan Aliens. The whole shelter laughed with him.

"You make this place light," his boss told him when he had tucked the last of the kids in, long after his shift had ended. She handed him a wrapped gift. He tore it open to find a painting by one of the teens of two hands meeting, surrounded by dozens of colorful "thank yous" and messages from the kids. He found he couldn't speak. She smiled and hugged him and sent him off to clean the kitchen and wipe his tears.

Every night, he checked his ears and his fingers and his back and his toes and made sure nothing had started reverting to green...

One evening, just after New Year's, he ran into Pathy at a mid-town bar. They pretended to be strangers, then found an empty booth in the back and really talked. He bought their drinks. The school's investigation had turned up nothing, she told him, and the team had been cleared of suspicion. David had graduated with honors that summer and taken a leading role at a prestigious genetics clinic. Already, their work with the mutagen extracted from Mike's blood had started opening important lines of medical research that could lead to clinical trials within a year.

Mike confirmed, in turn, that his mutation seemed to have stabilized – just as predicted. The only side effects were lingering tingles in his extremities and, he said with gravity, a constant craving for tapioca pudding. He told her he worked with children, had his own apartment and had, in fact, gone sunbathing in Central Park.

They choked up a little when they parted, careful to leave at separate times and in separate directions.

He wrote until 2 a.m. every morning and threw almost every scrap away.

He sold some articles to magazines.

He spent three hours one Sunday in the lobby of the Natural History Museum, admiring the brontosaurus skeleton and the Theodore Roosevelt quotes on the walls and the sun-showered hordes of schoolchildren and tourists and crowds and guides.

He couldn't afford the ticket to go inside.

He couldn't have minded less.

He started writing a novel that spring and joined a drama group and took guitar lessons from the shelter's teens. He donned Pinocchio-nose maple seeds on sunny afternoons in city parks, bought hot dogs from pushcart vendors for himself and any beggars in the vicinity, and started to teach his body how to move like a ninja again.

And in the mornings, he woke to find his pillow damp from crying.

He never remembered his dreams.

Don pried the window open with little effort and slipped inside.

The room was small, barely big enough for the narrow bed and the small table someone was obviously using for a desk. Don stepped carefully over a haphazardly placed stack of books and examined the pads of paper scattered across the table's surface. The familiar handwriting caught at his heart – until that moment, he'd half-hoped he was wrong. In some part of his mind, he still couldn't believe the man he'd tracked through the cryptic postcard sent to April was really his vanished brother, gone nearly six months now. But the handwriting on the pads was totally Mike: perfectly rounded letters at the beginning of each day's work, descending quickly into a spiky, narrow scrawl as he wrote faster and faster.

"It's true…" Don whispered.

He didn't know what to do with the knowledge. Should he wait for his brother – and it _was_ his brother, it _was_, even though his mind kept rejecting the truth – or should he come back some other night and hope to catch him? What did he want to accomplish, either way?

Don stared around the walls, their patched and yellowed plaster almost entirely hidden by posters and calendar art and children's drawings. A framed, awkward painting of hands hung over the bed.

The tapestry of his brother's new life.

Things could never be the same. And yet…there was a gaping hole in his life, in all their lives, where Mike had once been. The loss of his brother had been more immense and more painful, even, than the loss of Splinter.

Don wished, passionately and futilely, that he had been able to rein in his curiosity about Mike's fate after he vanished. Maybe Leo was right, he thought. Maybe it would have been better if he and Raph hadn't insisted on staying in the City after Mike left. Not just to protect their human friends from possible attacks, but to protect themselves from trying to find their brother and connect with him again.

While he vacillated, he heard footsteps in the hall. _Mike?_ Suddenly he knew that he had to get out. He wasn't ready for this confrontation – this reunion – at all.

But the footsteps stopped before they reached Mike's room. The walls were thin enough for Don to hear the jingle of keys in another lock down the hall, the slamming of another door, the creaking of someone dropping onto another hard bed.

_I can't do this yet_, he decided. But it didn't seem right to just leave, without a word or a sign. He fished a pen out of the chaos on the table, tore a blank page out of a pad of paper – and froze again. What could he say?

"Come home, things haven't been the same since you left." That would be stupid, not to mention a lie: things were exactly the same as they were before Mike had gone.

"Just dropped by for a visit, call home!" No, no, far too cheery. Too easy to misinterpret as an open invitation.

"How could you leave us?" Well, that was a little _too_ brief to cover the immense pain and confusion Mike had left in his wake, wasn't it?

Don wavered, touched the pen to paper, pulled it back, and thought some more. Then, in a hasty rush, he scrawled, "We miss you" across the page. He debated signing it, decided Mike would know who it was from, then pondered adding Raph's and Leo's names to it as well.

But that would be another lie, wouldn't it? Raph hardly ever brought up their brother's name, since Mike left. And Leo wouldn't want to be involved in this at all. He'd be furious that Don had even tracked down this dingy, rented room in the first place.

It was only three words. It was a whole world of meaning. He placed the note across the rumpled pillow and turned to go.

More footsteps sounded in the hall, and this time Don was sure: Mike was coming back. He took a deep breath, paused, snatched the note up, and dove for the rickety fire escape, sliding the window closed with all the speed that silence would allow. He dropped below the sill just as the light came on in the room behind him.

_Mike…_

He leaped across the narrow alley and pulled himself up a flight before he looked back.

Mike stood over his small table, leaning on it while he studied his notepads. When he placed his hands flat on the table, the fingers separated into a pair of narrow 'V's, so that it looked like he had two wide, familiar fingers on each hand.

_Oh, Mikey…_

Then thick brown hair fell across his forehead, and a five-fingered hand rose to smooth it back.

Don blinked.

A chill settled over him.

He glanced down at the paper crumpled in his hand.

"We miss you."

He tore it into tiny pieces and scattered them as he ran back across the rooftops, heading for home. ****

_Aggression._

Don's body rolled clear, even before his eyes cracked open. The murderous intent struck a second later, followed by Raph's alarmed shouts. Don fell into defending himself against a flurry of fast strikes and lunges that left no room for anything but training and instinct.

He jumped to an overhanging limb to gain fighting space.

"You DRUGGED me!" Leo raged in the morning light below.

Don tried to catch his breath and focus beyond his adrenaline and racing heart.

"You drugged me to put me to sleep! _And_ you snuck out to find Mike after his change! You could have gotten every one of us captured – or killed!"

Don shook his head, trying to clear the cobwebs and prepare for further attack. "You're being way too paranoid about Mike!" he shouted. _Not about me, though,_ he thought. _I'd put you under again in a heartbeat._

His eyes widened at the expression on his brother's face. _Maybe less._

"Paranoid? It's _humans_ we're talking about, Don. Humans without any reason NOT to come looking for more! Those 'friends' of his, those 'doctors,' they're going to get greedy someday. And once that happens, the second we let down our guard, they'll be on us!"

Don slapped the top of the tree limb. "Dammit, Leo! Mike's our brother! He wouldn't have done this if he didn't know for sure he could trust them! They've never come looking for us yet, and as far as we know they never will!"

Leo made the leap after him in a single move, catching the limb and flipping to his feet bare inches from where Don sat. He slammed a fist into his own plastron before his brother could move, pointing to the dark patch where the shell had cracked, then healed, long ago. "They _always_ come," he snarled. "We thought Shredder was _dead_ before we let down our guard, and he and the Foot were on us that Christmas like the freakin' 400 horsemen of the Apocalypse. We all still have the scars! They come _looking_, Mike, and — "

He caught himself, stricken.

"You're losing it, Leo," Don marveled. "You're really losing it."

His brother's face twisted back into anger. "Put...the drugs...away," he warned. "You use them on me again and I'll show you what it is to lose it. I deal with whatever dreams get thrown at us on MY terms, understand? MY terms."

"Which means what? So far, you haven't dealt with it at all! Listen to yourself, Leo!" Don glanced down at Raph, who had come to stand beneath the limb. "Admit it – you weren't going to let yourself sleep at all last night. But _you're_ the shaman. Remember? The Great Turtle's Chosen One. Not me. Not Raph. Not even Abanak. You've _got_ to get these dreams.

"Don't you think there's a reason he's sending them to us?" he demanded. "Maybe he wants us to do something besides pretend our brother's _dead_!"

Leo scowled into Don's eyes. "If that was the case," he said slowly, "he wouldn't have driven Mike out of this place. If the dreams are really from him, he's trying to _show_ us the damage Mike did, so we can stop being distracted and take care of this – this mission."

"_What_ mission?"

Their leader blinked at him.

Don held his brother's fevered gaze and took a deep breath, dropping his shoulders and forcing himself to relax. "What was it, Leo?" he asked. "What made you hate Mike so much for doing this?"

"'What made me' — ?" the echo came, incredulous. "I am not going over this again, Don. Stop dragging Mike around like he's still part of us! He's gone!"

Leo caught his breath, looked down at Raph, then back at his brother. His expression grew thoughtful.

"That's it. _That's_ the mission."

Don and Raph's eyes met, in alarm.

"We're here," Leo said slowly, "because it's time we learned how to be three."

Years passed. Abanak walked in the footsteps of his ancestors. He lived in secret along the shores and secret woods of Booders Falls, fishing, hunting, collecting the herbs and berries that made for flavorful stews and colorful artwork. He haunted the River, listening to all the wonders she shared. He found the caves beneath the town, more ancient even than the eldest generations of his People, and discovered traces of his ancestors hidden there.

Abanak left his own traces.

On occasion, he let himself be spotted – people would reel in shock, sometimes run away, and tell their friends they'd seen some sort of Indian ghost.

Capt. Mannigan's cousin Rick, the town police officer, grew ever more suspicious, managing even to tag Abanak on two or three occasions with a load of rock salt from his shotgun.

Abanak spoke to his ancestors, and sometimes, felt sure he heard them in return. He felt watched over. Time passed; they felt like good years.

Children that spotted him, he found, would pause and stare and often smile. He began to reveal himself to their wide-eyed wonder, deliberately. They didn't exactly worship him – but they did seem to recognize: Abanak was something special. Almost magical.

He began to crave that admiration. It helped justify the long nights moving in silence through the sleeping, stagnant town, the long hours of chanting to spirits whose symbols he chipped into the cave walls, stone flake by stone flake.

As the months of the third year slipped by, a new feeling grew stronger. Someone observing him. Enjoying the path of his life. Desiring...

And then, one night, while he lay in the dark and the cold of the caves, the voice of the River changed.

He stood and came to the mouth of the stone, bent, and touched the chill water flowing past.

The new voice spoke. It called itself Old Man River.

He felt the canniness, the ancient timbre of the mind that crept up through the water and into his.

Abanak, the voice said, had given him pleasure. The River suffered so much at the hands of man. Yet here he was, one of them – albeit a fearless, gifted, incredibly strong man – doing all he could to heal her waters.

Old Man River had noticed.

Old Man River was grateful.

_Continue,_ the voice said. _Continue what you are doing. You make me feel young again._

The benediction had come – the gods were real! Abanak walked on clouds that year, learning, studying whatever the Old Man offered, accepting any of the Old Man's tasks.

And then came the Turtles, afflicted with an abomination: the greedy leech that had stolen Raphael's blood. The leech had used it to become like men – but it walked as a murdering, destructive White Man.

A former being of the River should have known better.

He decided to aid them, only for the Turtles to turn the tables. They helped Abanak finally destroy the factory that secretly pumped foul chemicals into the river's waters. How he thrilled to the sight of its backed-up pipes vomiting the reeking waste over the streets and buildings, exposing Mayor Booder and his greedy horrors once and for all!

In gratitude, Abanak offered to guide the Turtles upriver to the one being he knew that could help them. Old Man River. When their friends' old car broke down high in the hills of Vermont, his dreams had already shown him where to find a birch-bark canoe hidden under a riverbank.

They'd paddled north together, then, carrying the tiny Raphael as they moved deeper into wilderness. When they reached the secret, true source of the River, the Old Man sent a school of fish to carry them – leap by thousand leap – to the top of its hidden waterfall.

There, the Old Man had greeted them, explaining his past as an Atlantean who turned against destructive technology to learn about the hidden nature of the physical world.

Abanak stood in awe.

But then, the Old Man sent the Turtles, helpless, into the sucking arms of the leech creature.

The shock was nearly too much. His master had gone dark, corrupted by his own awful age and power and isolation. Old Man River himself had turned the leech against the Turtles, just so he could taste something different and exciting again. Had he also been the one to encourage men like Booder to ruin the River, destroying countless tiny lives that he could again be amused?

Sickened, Abanak tried to defend his friends – but he was flung back, no more a match for the Old Man than he'd been for Mannigan or Booder or any of the others.

Salvation came, instead, from the Turtles' sensei. The rat Splinter turned the River's power back on its so-called master with a single, focused, blindingly powerful spiritual strike.

It came also from the tiny, regressed Raphael, who added his own tiny jaws to the struggle against the leech attacking his big brothers – drawing the mutagen back into his own system in the process.

The Old Man's body shrank to nothingness, swallowed by a vengeful River and a tiny, turtle-scarred leech.

Abanak took the Old Man's place with quiet joy. His destiny was true! Now, he would lead the River to true healing. As his first act of restoration, he sent the Turtles home with their restored brother atop another playful school of river trout.

The gods were real, and he stood among them now. For years, he abandoned himself to the constant thrill of the River's being – her flow, her gentle eddies, her gushing power against the encroaching waves of the Atlantic. With the devotion of a lover, he savored her stillness in the grip of winter as well as her summer nourishment of the infinite creatures moving in and on her waters. He came to know every crease of her shores and every curve of her stones.

He listened to the voices of the people who enjoyed or ignored or abused her wonders.

He sent gentle waves of gratitude to the workmen who labored to clean the fouled waters after the Booders Falls factory collapse.

He winced at the oil and waste that flowed from the roads and streams into his River every day. Every hour.

He raged at the reckless tons of garbage tossed into her current as the seasons crept by: sandwich wrappers, coffee cups, fishing tackle, beer cans, used tires, old appliances, even cars.

But what could he do? Tidal waves of vengeance or mysterious drownings would only lead men to dam up the River's power, divert her strength, even track their way to the source to destroy it.

"There's nothing you can do," a voice told him when he began to feel the stirrings of rage. "Let it be. This is just another part of the cycle."

He would try to protest, but...

"They didn't listen before. They won't listen now. You just have to let them burn themselves out. The River will always be here...and she will recover, some thousand, thousand years from now, becoming new for you."

Abanak let the voice soothe him, over the sound of the beings in the River calling to him for aid.

Although he felt the oneness of their existence with his own, he took the voice's advice, considering their deaths as the sloughing of hair or skin. He came to accept as a sacrifice to Time the cries of ducks wounded by rifles. The thrashing of trout torn from the living waters to drown in the bottom of fiberglass motorboats. The otters struck and left to die by passing jet skis. The poisoned algae turning brown, then black, then dead from the kiss of chemicals.

"Let them pass away. All these deaths will only hurry the humans' self-destruction. You will see. Be patient, Abanak. It is the way of the River. You will see..."

He had listened. The River grew ever more shallow, ever more foul, her marshes filling with sand for subdivisions, her streams choking with tainted storm-water runoff, her aquifers drawn down farther and farther for the insatiable bottlers and factories and power companies.

He couldn't feel the River clearly any more. Only hear the soothing voice...

And then one night a winter thunderstorm swept up the Valley, channeling itself even into the source waters. As thunder exploded overhead, he saw the River building below his perch, rising up the waterfall at his feet.

"Look out!" the voice cried.

Too late. The River seized him in a fist of power and tore him from the high seat, sweeping him down the falls and out the cliff-gates of the secret, mystic source and down, away, his connection lost.

Rejected.

Some miles downriver, Abanak crawled from the frost-rimmed waters, naked, shaking and retching, into the autumn-chilled forest. Only his decades of training in the ancient ways of the People allowed him to create a shelter and survive. He wandered days. Weeks.

When he returned to his people, they rejected him anew.

And then, finally, the voice returned, telling him to seek the Valley and help the Turtles find their way home.

"Tell them I am the Great Turtle," the voice said. "I will help you find your river again."

"The Great Turtle..." Abanak echoed. Was that the being whose voice had guided him so long? It made sense...why else would the Turtles have come into his life and helped him so long ago?

In honor of turtles, then, he had made the journey, wandering the hills until they began to change around him and fall into the past. When he discovered the ninjas, he had passed on what the voice told him to share.

But where was the river promised to him?

Who was this "Adversary" the Turtles spoke of?

Why did the fog hold them trapped on this strange island?

"Where have you led me?" he whispered, and woke.

Abanak caught the echo of a shout of anguish from across the fog, and watched a flock of awkward birds wheel over the jungle for a minute or two. "Michaelangelo," he muttered. He glanced at Raph, who paced a tight half-circle near his brothers, his back to the mists. Don and Leo still tossed restlessly in dream. Abanak pushed free of his bedroll and started to say something to Raphael, perhaps alert him to his approaching brother.

And then the chasm of fog caught his attention.

He sat quietly, contemplating.

Could it be? Had he really heard –

– the sound of water moving over stones?


	7. Chapter VI Holy Ground

**VI. Holy Ground**

Later that morning, the Turtles and Abanak donned their war gear, leaving the rest of their equipment secured at the camp site.

Just five minutes of hiking brought them to the center of the fog-encircled island and the bottom of a strange rock formation. The tower of stacked, shallow stones was just as Leo remembered it, spiraling into the sky in fragments and blocks, like a DNA helix in mid-crumble.

"This is where I fought...that thing," he told them. "At the top. That's the Great Turtle's nexus. His holy spot."

"I remember it," Raph said, understanding now why Leo had felt such dread the night before. When he and Mike had scaled this tower at the end of their last journey, leaving the wounded Don at its base, they had found Leo exhausted at the pinnacle, sprawled beside the bloody, horrific ruin of the huge rodent creature that had nearly killed them all. "At least we're in better shape to climb, this time." Raph shook out his limbs and cracked his neck in readiness.

Abanak laid a hand on one of the dry grey stones that rose abruptly from the trees and tried to jar it loose. Nothing happened. He looked skeptical. "After you," he said.

The four climbed steadily. In no time at all they were high enough to see the whole sheer-cliffed island they'd been trapped on. It was perhaps half a mile across, surrounded by the broad moat of churning fog. Their view of the jungle landscape beyond was swiftly lost in all directions to haze, which melted into the circle of pale sky and a blazing sun.

Abanak looked down after five minutes of climbing, shuddered hard, and did not do so again.

Their sweat left damp marks on the rock shelves.

Soon after, Leo pointed to a wide ledge just above. The pinnacle. They halted there, sharing the dwindling canteens and catching their breaths. Don ran a finger down the side of the huge, empty, gouged-out fossil eggshell at their backs.

"I always wanted to see this place," he told his brother. "When that mammal-thing broke my leg...when the mission was left to you, Leo, and I thought the others had been killed...my only regret was I wouldn't get to see the Great Turtle before I died, too."

Leo stared at the horizon. "Things went the way they had to," he said.

Abanak nodded. They waited for something to happen.

"I remember..." Leo said softly. "The Great Turtle told me, here: 'This is my prison, where I am trapped by my sadness.'"

They watched the shapeless, drifting clouds.

Leo slammed the back of a fist against the fossilized shell. "I thought we freed you!" he shouted. "We killed that thing. Where are you, now? Why is this happening again?!"

His brothers and Abanak watched warily.

Leo got to his feet and stalked around the perimeter of the egg. When he came around the other side, he stopped, turned and glared up at the sharp breaks at the top of the shell. Drawing his sword, he leaped, catching an edge with one hand and hauling himself over.

They waited.

"Leo?" Raph asked.

After a moment, Raph signaled. Don braced himself and caught his brother's foot, hoisting him up to peer in.

"Aw, crud." Raph looked over his shoulder. "Keep watch, will ya?"

He landed with a thud beside Leo, who was bent over one knee in the dust and fossil shards, shoulders heaving helplessly.

"Come on, bro," he said, grabbing him to his plastron. "It's okay."

Leo sobbed against him.

"What'd I do so wrong, Raph? Where's the voice, this time? Where's the Great Turtle? What are we supposed to do?"

"Come on, Leo," he repeated. "He'll show it to us in time."

Abanak watched them closely all the way back down.

Mike's first thought was: "He's huge!"

His next was: "Get away!"

But his legs wouldn't move – and not because of fear. Though his brain was screaming into overdrive, Mike's heart felt suddenly warmed.

The Great Turtle's jaws opened, the beak like a pair of massive arcing razors just a few yards from where Mike stood.

But they parted to speak, not to strike.

Just as he'd somehow known they would.

"Little one," the spirit-not-a-spirit said in a rumbling tone, "how you've grown."

Mike glanced over his shoulder – he was 15 feet from the tree line. He could make it, in a bolt, and into the jungle before the mountainous being before him could knock him down and rip him to shreds, his brain said. Plowing through the trunks would slow the Great Turtle long enough for Mike to get a good head start...but to where?

He brought his gaze back around and forced himself to breathe.

Whatever he was facing, if it was, in fact, a threat, he might as well face here and now.

_After all,_ he thought, _where in this jungle would I run to escape _him

"Grown?" he managed, in a voice only three keys higher than normal.

The Great Turtle's carapace shone in the starlight, a dome of shadow and reflection that blocked Mike's view of the trees beyond. The eyes shone, too, and the creases and hollows of the ancient face seemed so familiar they made his heart thump over.

"I remember you from the beginning," the deep words continued. "Do you remember?"

A presence moved across Mike's mind like the wash of a wave. He felt tiny, suddenly, yet crushed and cramped and, horribly, starving. He struggled, trying to bend and move, escape the terrible pressure around him. His limbs rubbed uselessly against the leathery walls surrounding him. Hunger ravaged his belly. In anguish, he opened his mouth to cry – and scratched his prison wall. His heart leaped with the discovery. Mike tore out with his beak and its sharp egg tooth, again and again, resting when the weakness overcame him. A tear in the encasing appeared. Another. The more he ripped the more he could move, could strain, could stretch and grasp his way free. His head emerged from the shell, bumping against that of another egg, and another. He forced his way through them, claws digging now into something gritty and thick: sand. His hunger raged, yet stronger still was the urge now to dig and climb and find his way toward – what? He didn't know.

Something snagged his rear leg, pinching, and pulled. Mike struggled. It tugged harder, dragging him back through the eggs. He turned to bite and fight, scrabbling for purchase on the empty shells, and found something wondrous: light and shadow and something that felt and smelled and looked just like him. Only...bigger.

"Your brother, Raphael," the voice said. "Hatched from an earlier clutch that year. He saw you digging the wrong direction and pulled you free."

Mike shuddered, trying to adjust back to his human form. "That – that can't be real," he said. "Turtles don't do that for each other."

"You four were _always_ special," the Great Turtle said. "It's why you were chosen to go on."

"Chosen?" he asked. "To go on where? What do you mean?"

He looked up at the huge, deep eyes, his fear now warring with excitement and wonder. So _this _being was the source of his memory-dreams. This limitless creature who called to his soul. This ancestor who Mike, by his choices, had rejected, and who now held him trapped...or was it just _held_?

"I'll show you," the Great Turtle answered.

This time, Mike felt the sensation of falling, down into darkness. _Impact._ He scrabbled for safe ground, legs dragging through a heavy ooze, struggling to get away. Through the heavy, terrifying scents of metal and foul water around him he could still smell a hint of the familiar – the scents of the three turtles he knew best. The ones who made him tingle in good ways inside, who made him feel safe and alive. He headed towards them. They inched their way through the dark cave together, dodging the great curved shards of broken glass, moving away from the ooze that tickled and stung on their skin. He began to feel woozy.

One of his friends surged forward suddenly. He could feel the intention from him – something very interesting, up there, on that ledge. The four turtles crept toward it as one. It was some kind of animal. Something furry, like the creatures behind the wires back at the pet store they'd left that morning. Something...special. Mike could _feel_ it. One of the scales on his back legs began to melt away.

"You did go on to become much more than ordinary turtles, didn't you?" the warm voice said.

Mike dropped to one knee in the heat of the jungle, overwhelmed.

"I – forgive me," he said. Mike shook his head, clearing it of the earliest of memories, then made himself ask what had to be known. "Please, ancient one. I thought you would – would kill me if you found me here, today."

"Why would I ever want to destroy my own child?"

Mike bowed his head to his knee, fighting the tears that threatened. His body felt warmed by the reassurance coming from the Great Turtle, emotions he didn't dare name.

"Because I'm human, now," he apologized.

"No," the voice said gently. "That would be impossible. You are a turtle walking for awhile in another form. I have seen you grow. I remember every step of your changing. Don't you remember how you delighted in each new gift?"

The images, the sensations, ran like a flickering film reel through his core.

The first steps on two legs.

Grasping the rung of a storm drain's ladder between fingers and his strange, new, bending thumb.

Sinking tiny white teeth through the scraps Splinter brought him and his brothers.

Standing tall.

"Your delight is _my_ delight," the Great Turtle said, coming so close his breath moved on Mike's shoulders like a steady, healing breeze. "How could I ever reject you for it?"

"But I'm _human_ now!" Mike insisted. "I've abandoned the turtles' way!"

One huge forefoot rose and stretched its scaly foot and claws toward Mike. "Did not Leonardo share this? I already told him: 'Fur is _better_ than claws and scales.' Else why would it have taken the ring of mammals to such heights, while we fell so far behind? Your choice was not a rejection. It was _fulfillment_...the next step on the journey of exploring our evolution."

Mike shook his head slowly in wonder. "Abanak said I chose against you, in selfishness. That you were angry."

He made himself finish. "That you wanted me gone."

A chill fell on the clearing.

"Abanak," the Great Turtle said, "has a great desire to return to what he once believed he was. Great enough to seize whatever false voices come to him, and believe whatever they sing."

"But... But my brothers heard your voice, too, calling us here again."

"I called you here. That is true. But Abanak chose to hear the voice of a shadow.

"Do you remember the being you call the Adversary? Your brother destroyed its body to free the spirit of your ancestors... but it clung to life, trapped here, feeding off the sorrows of Leonardo and, later, your friend Abanak's connection to the spirit realm. Through the two of them, the Adversary caught glimpses of your world, in your age...and now it seeks to prey on the ring of the reptiles once more."

Mike stood up, pale. "What are you saying?"

"I am saying, this jungle is not safe any longer, and soon your home will not be, either. The Adversary seeks to take a new form – Abanak's – and escape this barren dream-world for a new feeding ground. But more even than fresh reptile blood, it hungers for vengeance. It longs to punish the turtles-who-grew, the ones who robbed it of me and my sorrow that fed it these many millennia. And it yearns the most to destroy the one who finally brought it down."

"Leo," Mike breathed. His eyes widened. "Then you have to go! Warn him, now! And Don and Raph – tell them Abanak's been fooled by this thing, that there's danger! – Why are you standing here talking with me?"

The Great Turtle's head sank low, low, his heavy chin brushing the sharp grass of the ground. "I wandered too far, once freed. The Adversary grew in strength."

"But – "

"The source of my connection to my children is the tower of the Great Egg. The Adversary knows this...I've been cut off. Even in dreams, I could barely brush your minds enough to call you here."

"But now we're here!" Mike slapped his chest with one hand and pointed to himself. "See? In the flesh. I can't be that far behind the guys – go appear to the others!"

The head swung slowly, side to side, the dark eyes lidded. "You are the only one who sees or hears me, now," it said. "You, my nearly human scion, are the only one who can bridge the gap between reptile and mammal."

Mike caught his breath. A long moment passed.

Slowly, he stepped forward until he could touch the cool, dry beak with his fingers.

"Oh, Great Turtle," he whispered. "How can that be? I'm the only one who _couldn't_ hear, before. Are you only fooling me now, too?"

The head slowly rose, then pressed against him, until Mike leaned his own forehead against the face of the Great Turtle.

"My son, I have always been with you. You had only to let me come near."

Mike closed his eyes, lingering in a moment that seemed to lay a salve on all the long, raw years from eggshell on.

"Then..." He stepped back. "Then, I'm ready. How do we save the others?"

The Great Turtle reared, his plastron clearing the ground so high Mike could have walked beneath it just by ducking his head. One great foot stretched up and clawed at the sky.

"You'll have to find a way."

And the spirit rose, moving up the air, fading into wisps of shadow and cloud.

"Wait!" Mike cried.

A star seemed to wink at him from high above. His mind's eye filled with the faces of his brothers.

Moments later, Mike was backtracking through the jungle, the stew packed in a thermos, his most essential gear slung over one shoulder as he struggled to trace his own trail. Finding the clues in the dark came much harder than it had a few years before, and if it weren't for the carelessness of his earlier passage, Mike decided, he wouldn't be on the trail at all.

"Slow and steady wins the race," he muttered grimly. "Guess I'm a real tortoise in at least one way, tonight."

But the old knowledge began trickling back into his movements and his mind: how to catch the subtle differences from one patch of wild land to another, how to spot where a branch had been disturbed, how to sense where the ground had felt the press of passing creatures. After a time, he removed his boots for a while to better feel the path and its clues, but left the sturdy wool socks on to protect feet that had become more sensitive than he'd realized in the City.

An hour passed. Then two. He hummed songs by Van Halen and Guns 'N' Roses and The Cure to keep himself awake and alert, fingers working the guitar chords in the dark air.

Scent led him, finally, to the place Abanak had met him and his brothers. He poked at the cold ashes of their fire, already nearly crowded out with undergrowth.

He found the Turtles' trail.

But, as the morning of the fourth day slowly warmed the trees, he reached a quiet ridge where the tracks simply vanished from the soft ground of the trail.

He cast about for a time, scanning the underbrush and surrounding trees, searching for where a ninja might seek to hide his passage – but he knew the search was in vain.

"It's just like last time," he said, and felt the tight hurt rising again.

Cut off.

Left behind.

"They've moved further on that ring of yours!" he shouted. "What now? They're in some other level of history! Where am I supposed to go?"

He listened.

The air grew damper around him, sunlight releasing the night's moisture from the trees.

"What am I supposed to do!?"

Nothing answered.

Mike cursed, dropped his pack and leaped at the nearest tree, hauling himself to the dangerously thin branches of the top, until he had a clear view of the sky. He scanned it. The morning haze formed no clouds, turtle-shaped or otherwise.

"Where are you?" he yelled. "Abanak! Don!! Raph!! Leo!!!"

A squall of strange-feathered birds rose protesting from a group of trees to the east. He watched them ruefully, wondering if he'd end up hunting their kind for dinner for the rest of his life.

And then Mike saw it.

Away downhill, in the center of a vast, bowl-shaped valley: the circle of fog.

An island of jungle trapped by the mists, little more than a mile away.

"You're over there, aren't you?" Mike whispered. "That's where I've gotta go..."

The Great Turtle whispered: "Listen for the false voices, and find where they are true."

As he hiked that fourth morning, heading east toward the tower while seeking any sign of his family, Mike warred with his own body. "Should have trained harder," he told himself when he stumbled for the third time, vision blurred with exhaustion and heat. He'd only slept a few hours since they left the farmhouse. Shaking the last drops from his canteen, he listened for any hint of a nearby stream – and heard something stronger.

"That sounds like a river..." Mike thought. "I don't remember any rivers being here, last time."

He continued toward the island, led now by the voice of the water.

The ground sloped down and down. He could hear the river's rush more clearly. Every minute, he felt cooler, more awake, and yet his vision seemed hazier than before. It had to be the dehydration. The green scent of a river's banks grew steadily, and all his limbs tingled in anticipation of a dip in cold water.

His weary mind registered the blurring, damp thinness in the air as the kind of friendly morning mist that rose off the pond at the farm or the Connecticut River in the mornings, while he and his brothers returned from a night run.

But his instincts began to warn.

Mike stopped. The sound of the river came from just ahead, rippling and lapping and rushing against stones, like something both playful and a refuge, pulling at the deepest turtle-memories he still carried within.

He just couldn't quite see the water...because of the fog.

The fog.

And then he knew. Mike spun on one foot and bolted back up the hill.

He almost crashed into the side of a sudden cliff, a wall that hadn't been there seconds ago.

The fog crowded over him, descending from above in churning layers that burned Mike's chest at his every ragged breath.

"No!" he yelled, scrabbling at the soft earth of the cliff, which only crumbled at his touch.

Something advanced on him. The smell of the creature bearing down came back to him with visceral memories of fierceness and violence, from that awful journey so many years before.

But what sent him retreating along the cliff wall was something new.

This time, the Adversary wasn't attacking out of fear of Mike and his brothers, defending its long-held victim, the Great Turtle, from being freed.

This time, it was _hungry_.

A huge shadow rushed at Mike, and he leapt away from the wall, landing with a great splash in the cool water of the river. The shadow lunged again and he dove beneath the surface. Mike kicked hard, striking instinctively for the far shore and what he guessed would be the island that held his brothers. But the river's current suddenly clutched him, hard and unrelenting as a vise.

He realized his mistake and pushed hard against it, trying to swim free, but the water shoved him further down after every stroke.

Choking in the undertow, Mike kept trying to switch to the "turtle" breathing he and his brothers had always used to buy themselves extra time underwater. But the technique wouldn't work.

He struggled. Every time he neared the surface, the river would jerk him back. He swallowed sharp water that ripped its way down into his belly and his lungs.

Limbs flailing, moved entirely now by panic, Mike tried to "turtle" breathe again.

A thought crossed his mind with incredible clarity.

"Oh yeah," Mike realized. "I'm human now."

His head struck rock.


	8. Chapter VII Betrayals

**VII. Betrayals**

At the bottom of the spiral tower, Leo sent Abanak back to their camp.

"Just stay awake while we're gone," Leo cautioned. "If you hear anything, if you see anything, if you even _feel _something, yell. We'll be there in 30 seconds."

"Or less," Don added.

"It will be fine," Abanak said.

When the man had gone, Leo settled himself in _seiza_, kneeling, his swords propped against a tree in easy reach. Raph dropped heavily to the patch of dirt they'd chosen and sat with one knee up, ready to move.

"Don," Leo asked.

_It's been too many years,_ Don thought. _I've forgotten how. The connection won't come. _

He felt his brothers' gazes on him, felt their confidence. Their hope.

_It didn't even work back then. It took Leo to make the circle, to defeat the Adversary and heal the ring of history._

But he steeled himself, then began laying out the river stones in the quartered-circle pattern he'd once used to draw the energies.

"Not that way, Donnie," Leo said. "Do it with three points."

Don and Raph shared a long look. Then Don bent and adjusted the circle, creating an inner triangle with the stones.

After finishing, he scraped a match across his shell, lit the bundled sweetgrass, borrowed from Abanak, and set it in the center.

"It's time," Leo told them.

Raph groaned, but moved into _seiza_ and came forward, until his knees nearly touched the circle's edge. Don knelt, too, at the apex of two lines, and watched as Leo took the third.

Don felt the swirl of energy move through them, counter-clockwise, like a rush of flame. He nearly wept with relief, and with the joy of it, too. It felt as though their sense of oneness in battle, that raw flow of movement and awareness, had become manifest in this hot, vivid pulse at the center of his being. Leo brought his hands up and clapped, twice. Their circle fairly hummed.

"Focus," Leo told them.

They did.

_All right, Leo,_ Don thought. _It worked._ _We've raised the energies. What are you going to do with them?_

Long minutes passed.

Slowly, he felt attention on him. So did his brothers.

It didn't feel friendly.

"Great Turtle," Don chanted, "father of us all. Come to us!"

Eyes closed, he could hear Raph's fists clench in embarrassment to the point of creaking.

"Come to us," Leo urged. "Show us why we are here."

They waited. The attention took on an edge of malice. Their cycling energy weakened. "Focus," Leo admonished.

The fog sent tendrils over the cliff edges all around the island, hesitant at first, then moving faster, crawling through the dense ferns and strange trunks. They converged on the Turtles, swarming, boiling over them, latching onto their bright energies, sucking at their spirits – sucking at _them_.

"It's the Adversary!" Don cried.

"Don! Raph! Don't break the circle!"

The sunlight dimmed.

Consciousness – _shifted._

Raphael landed soundlessly on the roof – at least, he thought he made no sound. Hard to tell, really, with the heavy bass thumping up through the building and out onto the street. He grinned briefly. Someone was having a party, that was for sure, and as far as he was concerned, they had impeccable taste in music. It wouldn't last, though. People in the nearby buildings and apartments wouldn't put up with it for long. They probably wouldn't bring in the cops to take care of the noise, either – no, in this neighborhood, the police wouldn't get called unless somebody got hurt trying to take care of it himself.

He moved lightly around the drifts of snow on the roof, taking care not to leave any telltale footprints. It wasn't likely that anyone would come up here and see his tracks before the spring rains melted them, but there was no sense in taking chances.

_Except for the chances we're already taking, just by being here,_ he reminded himself. He pulled the mottled grey poncho closer. There had been a time when he wouldn't have bothered with the camouflage, preferring to take his chances against anyone who might see him. Back then, though, he'd had a father to pretend he was rebelling against with his carelessness.

Back then, he'd had three brothers.

Of the two he had left, Raph never would have expected to be chasing this one around New York's frozen heights in the middle of the night. At least Don had finally stopped running. Raph crept around the bulk of an air conditioning unit and spied his brother crouched at the edge of the roof, leaning against the low wall that surrounded the space. The poncho he wore, twin to Raph's, obscured him from any casual gazes.

_Good thing, too, 'cause he's sure not tryin' real hard to stay invisible,_ Raph thought irritably.

A slight relaxation in his brother's shoulders, a minor dip in his posture, told Raph when Don became aware of him, even though Don didn't look around or do anything else to acknowledge his pursuer. Raphael relaxed fractionally himself – he could approach now without risking the business end of a _bo_ staff in his gut, or some other equally extreme response. The risk came from more than just the usual fighter's reflexes...something had Don tense and worried, wound as tight as piano wire, and it was hard to get near him when he was like that.

"Hey, you wanna sit back before some idiot spots you?" Raph hissed as he closed the distance between them. "All they gotta do is look up – "

"No one will look up, Raph," Don responded without turning around. "No one is looking at anything higher than the party on the third floor." He didn't budge from his chosen spot.

Raph followed his brother's fixed gaze to a nondescript brownstone on the far side of the street, opposite the party site. "What's over there?" he wondered out loud. "Looks like a quiet building to me."

"It should be quiet – the kids all have to be in bed by 10 on a school night."

Raph waited a beat to see if that would make sense after he'd let it sink in.

It didn't.

"Okay, I'll bite. What kids?"

Don sighed. "The kids who live at that shelter."

It could be like talking to a wall, trying to get information out of Donnie when he was in a mood, Raph reflected. Fortunately, the night was clear and cool, the music was happenin', and he didn't have anywhere else in the world to be right that minute.

"Donatello. Do you want to tell me exactly why you're staring at a building full o' homeless kids? Or am I gonna hafta beat it out of you?" he threatened playfully, not meaning it.

If he could shake his brother out of this strange funk, they might even be able to make a midnight exercise run out of it, and find some trouble they could clean up, together. He was enjoying that idea so much that it took several seconds for Don's eventual answer to finally sink in.

"Wait, _what_?!"

"I said, I'm waiting for Mike to get off work," Don repeated patiently. He swiveled his gaze around to watch Raph wrestle with the idea, then resumed his silent survey of the opposite building.

_Mike…_

Just hearing the name brought the hurt back, like it was only yesterday that their brother had vanished instead of most of a year. For a few seconds, Raph couldn't seem to breathe, the pain was so fresh.

Then he dragged in a deep breath. "Are you…? Did he…? Is it…?"

He flailed for something coherent to ask.

"Yes, I'm sure; yes, he really did survive his idiotic science experiment like April says; and yes, it's safe to sit here and watch him walk home from work," Don interpreted the fractional questions Raph couldn't quite bring to the surface. He glanced at his struggling brother and softened a bit. "I come here a couple times a week, you know. I just…I had to see him for myself."

_Leo is gonna hit the roof when he finds out!_ In the months since Michaelangelo's disappearance, the mere sound of their brother's name could sometimes drive Leo into a teeth-grinding fury. If that wasn't bad enough, it was always followed by days of Leo's most extreme paranoia – and no one did "paranoia" like Leo, that was for sure! – when he would restlessly prowl the tunnels around their underground home, seeking any sign of the unknown people who might be looking for them. Faced with that reaction, both Don and Raph had learned to steer their conversations away from anything that might stand a chance of touching on the subject of their lost brother.

It didn't leave much for them to talk about.

And none of them ever, ever, went in the room that had once been Mike's.

The door of the shelter opened. A dark-haired man stepped out onto the stoop, still talking to someone inside.

"Is that him?" Raph whispered, suddenly nervous. He crouched down lower, until he could barely see the man.

Don looked faintly amused. "No. Trust me, you'll know him when you see him. I was surprised…"

"Have you talked to him?" Raph could feel his eyes widen at the idea – it wasn't like Donnie to go against the orders of the clan leader, whether that leader was Splinter or Leonardo. And Leo had been very definite about his feelings regarding Mike.

"No," Don said uneasily, after a moment. "I want to…but what good would it do? It's never going to be the same again, is it? Even if Leo…" he trailed off.

They both sat silent as the man below finished his conversation and went off down the street. The door closed.

"Are you sure he's in there now?" Raph found himself hoping Don would admit to some uncertainty.

But, "I'm sure," Don said firmly. "Tonight, he'll stay at the shelter until midnight. I don't know what he's doing, but he's here on duty that late every Tuesday night, like clockwork." He caught Raph's suspicious look and explained: "They have really cruddy security on their computers."

Raph shifted his weight, agitated. "It's pretty late already. Maybe we missed him." In the 10 months since they'd last seen him, Raph had worked fervently to train his mind away from thoughts of his brother. The walls and distractions and adaptations he'd built would all change if he sat here much longer with Donatello.

"We haven't missed him," Don hunched himself further into the camouflage. "It's not midnight yet. You can go if you want – I didn't ask you to follow me, tonight."

Raph sent his brother one of his better glares, one that went unnoticed as Don waited patiently, watching the shelter's main entrance as if it was one of his endless experiments. Donnie had always had a particular knack for getting under Raph's shell by doing just that – brushing off even his worst outbursts with calm, steady logic that inevitably turned the problem right back on him.

Now he _couldn't_ leave, even if he'd wanted to.

Raphael's keen ears picked up a new, welcome sound in the building below them. "There's a fight breaking out at that party," he grinned, distracted by the evidence of a growing brawl.

"Wondered how long that was going to take…" Don murmured.

Something crashed loudly, cutting the music off with a horrible screech of distortion. "There went the stereo," Raph sighed regret as the track's beat was replaced by the rising volume of angry shouts and yells of rage. From the noise, the neighbors must've finally reached their breaking points.

Across the street, the door caught his attention as it opened one more time. Raph froze.

Mike bounded outside.

His brother was unmistakable, changed though he was. He went straight from the stoop to the sidewalk, not bothering with the half-dozen steps in between, and bounced lightly on his feet when he landed. He shifted a backpack easily across his shoulders, the gestures heartbreakingly familiar, the movements of his hands on the straps like lightning. He fairly radiated energy and enthusiasm. His steps were light and jaunty, in spite of the heavy pack and the bulky Mets jacket he wore.

_Mike…_

Raph's heart beat so hard against his plastron it was painful. Beside him, Don nodded. "See what I mean?"

Below, Mike paused to check out the party/brawl going on four stories below them. He grinned – they could see it from their vantage point – at a particularly colorful string of obscenities that came floating out of the chaos.

And then Mike looked up.

"Crap!"

They both dropped below the edge of the wall.

"He saw us." Don was certain on that point.

"Leo's gonna _kill_ us!" Raph whirled in his crouch, caught the edge of his brother's poncho and pulled him backward, away from Mike's line of sight.

"Wait." Don broke free of the grip as Raph started to run. "Let's just see…"

"Are you _crazy_?" Raph hissed in alarm when his brother turned back. "Don!"

Donatello didn't answer. He walked to the edge and stood quiet, openly staring down to the street.

After a long moment, Raph sidled back to stand beside him, half-certain what he would find there.

Mike stood frozen on the sidewalk, staring up at the two of them. When Raph came into view, they could almost hear the gasp. Mike's face broke into a smile almost unbearable in its familiarity and its strangeness. He raised a hand in greeting.

They didn't move.

They could see him watching – was it hopefully? – for Leo to step forward, too.

Raph could feel Don trembling beside him, a thin shiver that had nothing to do with the season. Raph understood. He clenched his own hands into fists. If they moved – if they gave the slightest hint of returning the greeting – Mike would misinterpret it, Raph knew. Their brother would break his vow and come looking for them, if he thought for an instant they would allow it.

...If he saw how much they missed him.

Mike's smile faded at their stillness. His face registered confusion, hurt and, finally, resignation. His hand fell. He looked away, his mouth a little open, a cloud of breath curling out into the chill of the night. Then he shouldered his pack more firmly and resumed his interrupted walk to wherever he lived.

Raph sighed a curse at no one as they faded into the shadows, away from the edge. Don tilted his head back, ostensibly to follow the trail of an airplane across the night sky. They didn't talk for a long while. The last sounds of the fight, four stories below, trailed off into the usual hum of the City.

At last, Don stirred. "C'mon," he called over his shoulder as he took off at a run.

"Where are we going?" Raph snapped. He was irritated now, all traces of his earlier good mood burned away.

Don set a steady pace, and didn't reply right away. They'd gone several blocks before he spoke again. "I have to make sure he makes it home okay."

_This is a really bad idea._ Raph clenched his jaw and didn't share his misgivings.

They trailed Mike along the night-muted streets for half an hour. They didn't speak. He didn't look up.

At last, their brother disappeared into the stairwell next to a Chinese restaurant. "He lives in that building, uh? So fine, he's home safe and sound," Raph said. "Can we go now?"

"Not yet." Don circled around to the back of the building, ignoring Raph, who seethed as he followed. "See that window there? That's the room Mike rents. Pretty much every night, he writes until two in the morning. It doesn't matter when he gets home – he almost always writes."

"You stalkin' the guy, Donnie?" Raph wondered.

Don turned away, trying to hide the stricken expression he wore.

They waited outside until long after two, but the light never came on in Mike's room.

Folded in darkness on the stained grey carpet, Michaelangelo crouched just outside the glow of the city that fell through his window and illuminated the room.

He watched his brothers watching for him.

In a low voice he repeated, over and over, in a kind of mantra, until Don and Raph finally gave up and went home:

"I want this more.

"I want this more.

"I want this more."

Raphael snarled.

Don rocked backward, yanked off balance and drained as none of the dreams had ever left him before.

Leo slapped his palms on the ground in front of him, leaning forward with a bared-teeth grimace. "Focus!" he shouted through gritted teeth. "Stay centered! Grounded!"

They fought to bring their energies back up; drawing together, straining to keep the circle balanced. Don struggled to fend off an exhaustion so deep he could hardly breathe against it.

Raphael crouched, suddenly, seemed to condense; Don could feel it at every level. Then his brother surged forward with a burst that nearly knocked the others over, breaking the grip of the fog and its draining effects. Don and Leo followed in his wake, shouting a battle cry, the intensity of their energy scattering what was left of the mist. The whole island seemed to ripple, tattering the last tendrils of fog retreating for the moat.

The Turtles' auras fell back into their sources, pulsed hard, and faded as the three broke loose of the circle. Don let himself topple and lie gasping for breath as the sun grew sharp again, above.

"What the hell..." Raph managed, "...was that?"

Don walked his fingers forward until they closed on the nearest round stone. It buzzed and snapped discordantly, like static. "That," he answered weakly, "was the Adversary."

After what seemed an age, he felt his strength returning. Don pushed himself up and caught sight of Leo, who knelt staring at his brothers, his face pale with shock.

"You okay, Leo?" he ventured.

His brother turned confused eyes to meet his. "You – you both – betrayed us..." He trailed off. Leo raised a hand to the side of his head, as if to see if it was still there. In the chasm, the fog billowed up again.

Don's stomach knotted.

"I've got no one to trust," Leo said, wonderingly.

"Get off your high horse," Raph snapped, shoving himself up. "You're the one who did the betraying, Leo. When are you gonna figure out you can't make us into something we're not? We're _not _three... And we're not safe, either. We're never gonna live without danger, whether Mike walks around in a tutu yelling about turtles and ninjas or stays cooped underground in the friggin' box you want to keep him in.

"We're warriors, Leo. There's always gonna be people out there who want to do us in! But you're making it so we can't even have our own lives _before_ they get to us."

The mists roiled.

Raph stalked off, heading after Abanak.

A while later, Don gathered up the stones, extinguished the sweetgrass, and brushed the circle clear with a frond broken from some kind of palm tree, feeling the last of the energies swirl and scatter like the dust. When he finished, he came and stood before his brother. Leo still knelt, eyes wide and shoulders high with hurt.

Leo didn't seem to see him.

Eventually, Don sighed. "It was a good thought, Leo, to try to make it just the three of us," he said. "At least you tried."

After another long moment of silence, Don left him and headed for camp.

Leo brushed a hand across his face, trailing a last shred of mist.

"Mike?" he whispered, sensing something.

The drift of fog crept against his mind, drawing it sideways once more, against his will.

He and Mike slid back into dream.

Mike sometimes woke long before his alarm to the imagined touch of a brother waking him for early training. On those mornings, he'd dress in the darkness, stop at the coffee shop run by a Syrian couple and walk the City for hours, until it was time for his shift at work.

Occasionally, he'd find himself haunting the old neighborhoods, alert for any sign of being followed. He'd sometimes catch sight of Shadow outside her school, and twice he spotted Casey coming out of the drugstore with the morning paper. Whenever it happened, he'd keep his face hidden in its bold red scarf, and hope Leo wouldn't catch him violating his promise to stay away.

One morning, late that second November, he surged from his pillow in panic, fighting off the nightmare so hard he put an elbow through the wall. He collected himself, then turned on a lamp to examine the damage. Mike cursed. He'd staved in the photo of the young boxer with the red gloves, a picture he'd cut from a local fitness magazine. Shadow. She was torn across her midriff, a wrinkle neatly bisecting her fierce grin.

He peeled the magazine page off the wall. Bits of plaster crumbled to his Salvation Army blanket. Mike shoved his sleep-spiked hair back, and his mind played for him the many times he and Raph had patched up damage to their various homes.

"Dammit," he cursed again. "Leave me alone."

He hadn't caught sight of that brother – of any of his brothers – since that night in March. But he'd seen evidence they'd been near. Instead of leaving town, like Leo had threatened, they spied on him.

Mike left the coffee shop this time with a sense of reckless purpose. Instead of accidental, aimless wandering, he took the subway to a deliberate destination, darkness still ruling as he climbed back to the surface and jogged up the street. He ran down an alley, checking his watch, scaled a fire escape and started crossing the block by rooftop. His boots left icy prints in the slush atop an old office building's slippery black tarpaper, all the way to the brick façade facing Shadow's high school. There, he leaned against its ledge, breathing hard, and cracked the top off his coffee, waiting as the first gleams of light rose in the east above the city's glow. From his perch, he could watch school buses pull in below, send up their fumes and disgorge teens, then head out for their next rounds.

He sipped his drink.

"Hey, pervert!"

Mike whipped around, then nearly fell off the roof in shock.

Raphael stood a few feet behind him in the predawn darkness, hands on his hips. "Quit stalkin' my niece," he growled.

Mike caught his balance. "Raph..." he whispered.

"Yeah. What?" His brother walked to the edge of the roof and looked over. After a moment, he grinned. "And speak of the devil. There she is," he said, pointing to where Shadow had jumped off the latest chugging bus. Raph watched her run toward a knot of friends by the high school door, and ignored the gaping man beside him.

"What – what's happened?" Mike managed.

"What do you mean?"

"Where've you been?" his brother demanded. "Why show yourself, now? You've been tracking me for months – you think I don't notice the signs? It's like you're just waiting for me to mess up, to take me out or something..." He trailed off. "Come on, Raph, did someone get sick, or hurt? What is it?"

Raph shifted his weight. Finally, he said:

"I just got tired of waitin' for you to come 'round."

Mike's jaw dropped. Then he threw a punch of frustration, one so slow compared to what he used to deliver that Raph actually laughed in shock as he casually dodged.

His brother ignored it. "'For me to come 'round?'" Mike echoed. "Are you kidding me? I'm supposed to be dead to you guys, remember? I gotta write to April in code. I gotta stay the hell away from the tunnels. I gotta pretend to have frickin' amnesia so no one goes poking around in my past too hard! And you were waitin' for _me_ to come around?"

He lunged again, but this time Raph caught his fist in one solid grip. Mike shot his other hand forward and grasped Raph's, as though to perform a disarming technique, but ran his fingers like a drowning man's over the solid bones and the rough, scarred green skin, instead.

Raph shuddered under the touch.

"Dang," Mike breathed, staring at their hands. "It's really you. I think of you guys every day, Raph. Used to be every hour. What you might be doing. What you might be thinking. How much you see of what I'm working on and the classes I'm taking and the people I meet." He looked away, shaking. "I miss training with you, Raph. I miss your voice. I miss watching wrestling together and teasing Shadow and making dinner and – "

Raph freed his hand with a sharp twist, before Mike could even tighten his grip.

"I shouldn't have come, Mike. I'm sorry."

"Wait, no – "

"I didn't mean to bring it all up for you. I just...had ta see that you're okay."

The words were almost out of Mike's mouth before he caught them and choked them back.

"Of – of course I'm okay, Raph. Life's good." He ran his hand back through his hair, looked out at his brother again with eyes wide and glistening. "The kids at the shelter...I guess you know about that place...they're great. They're more than great; they're fantastic! You wouldn't believe the stuff they've been through, and the stuff they do in spite of it all. I'm taking classes so I can get licensed in how to help them out better.

"And I'm teaching some classes of my own at the fitness center, now. Kickboxing and yoga, can ya believe it? On the weekends, I'm even performing guitar at the bars." He waggled his fingers. "Best part about being a human: double chords."

"That's great, Mike."

"Yeah, everything's great. I've finally got a book getting published. I'll tell April where to buy a copy when it's out – guess sending one to her would be kind of a dead giveaway of our locations, though, huh?"

Raph turned back to watch the high school. "Yeah."

"I wrote a song for the kids," Mike hurried on.

"How's it go."

He hesitated. "It sounds better with the guitar. I'm using the one at the shelter, until I can save up enough for my own." Mike closed his eyes and took a breath. His booted foot tapped a rhythm in the snow.

_"The city streets are gleaming with a red, unholy light _

_and I'm walkin' down their canyons wishin' I could lose my sight_

_'cause there's shadows in these alleys that I never want to know_

_and a sorrow from these valleys that I never want to show._

_"There's a dirty secret carried I can't shine out from my past_

_And thinkin' 'bout it's killin' me, I'm never gonna last_

_Now that every door has opened, I just can't seem to walk through_

_All my dreams are coming real but they're nothing without you – "_

He opened his eyes before starting the refrain.

Raphael was gone.

Mike crouched on his haunches and lay a finger on the slush, where it had been crushed by a foot with only two, broad toes.

Proof his brother really had been there.

Through the catch in his voice, he finally released the real words.

"Please, don't go."

An hour later, Leo's eyes opened wide as the door to the lair slid open. It had to be Raph, come home late – or was it early? – from whatever it was he did on his solo runs. Leo listened to the small noises of his brother shucking off his winter poncho, padding across the broad central chamber, cracking their "college dorm" refrigerator and popping open a beer.

He closed his eyes when that brother approached his room. He lay still on his futon and slid his consciousness downward in the usual way Leo fooled his family into thinking he was asleep.

But Raph stopped just inside the arch of his room and, for three or four long minutes, just stood there, watching him. Leo listened, waiting for the footsteps to move away. He could smell the acrid odor of the beer and the strange mix of chill and sweat and Raph-scent he associated with all their winter runs.

"I know you're awake, Leo," his brother said, finally, taking a swig of the beer. "Had enough yet?"

Leo sighed. "Enough what," he asked wearily, not bothering to hide the irritation in his voice.

"You know what I'm talking about."

"No, I do not. You come in, and you wake me up, and you start throwing riddles at me. I'm tired, Raph."

Raph took a long pull off the bottle and swallowed, noisily. "I know what you promised him," he said.

"Raph..." Leo rolled over and covered his face with a forearm. "You're drunk."

"I ain't drunk," Raph told him, voice steady and low. "I said, I know what you promised him."

"I don't want to play this now!" Leo shouted. "Promised who what?"

"You told Splinter, on his deathbed, you'd keep us protected. Didn't you? That you'd keep us safe."

Leo sat up, slowly, the blanket falling down his shell, and squinted at the shadow in his doorway. "You had no right to listen. That was a private conversation between Master and me."

Raph snorted. "I didn't listen in on anything. I just know you."

"Do you have a point to this?"

"Yeah, Leo, I do. I'll ask it again. Have you had enough yet?"

Leo stared at him.

The silence stretched out for eons.

"I'll take that as a 'no,'" Raph said finally, tossing back the last of the beer and setting the wet bottle atop Leo's shrine of memory for Master Splinter. "Sorry to hear it. Mike's coming for Christmas, anyway."

Leo lunged and snatched the dripping bottle off the narrow table, then froze. "What!?"

"You heard me, Leo. You can hide out down here if you want. But our brother is coming to April and Casey's. And me and Don'll be there."

The rage – the fear – left him speechless.

"It's safe," Raph assured him. "It's safe enough. And if you want it even safer, you can actually come with us and help stand guard. But Mike's gonna be invited. And you know it's time."

Leo almost threw the bottle at him. Raph shook his head, watching Leo's arm tense and drop back and tense again.

Raph left.

Leo lit a candle with shaking fingers and held it before the shrine, snatching up a cloth to frantically soak up the ring of staining water from the wood in its light. He finished wiping and looked up. The brush calligraphy of Splinter's name stood out black and steady on its rice-paper setting, as the candlelight flickered orange shadows across the characters.

Leo drew back, hearing the kitchen noises as Raphael started putting together breakfast. He didn't get up, himself, until long after Don's snores ended and Don got up to join their brother at the table.

"I keep us safe," Leo whispered in his dark bedroom. "It's what I have to do."


	9. Chapter VIII The Adversary

**VIII. The Adversary**

Leo opened his eyes. It seemed a monumental task. The trees and the tower of rocks above seemed blurry. His whole being ached as he sat up, and he felt as weak as he had while recovering from the Shredder Christmas.

An image of Abanak slid across his mind.

The dreams weren't coming from the Great Turtle anymore, Leo was sure.

His brothers burst into the clearing. "He's gone," Raph said.

Leo snapped his head up, shook it hard.

"Abanak's gone," Don explained. "We found this." He held up the embroidered vest.

Leo breathed twice, staring at them, gathering himself.

"Both of you, get in the trees," he said. "Hunt for vines, green branches, all that you can gather. Make a rope. We're going down that cliff – now."

"Are you sure, Leo?" Don asked, watching warily as his brother got to his feet, swayed and braced himself against a tree.

"Abanak's down there, with the Adversary," Leo cut him off. "And they've got Mike."

In its chasm, the fog rolled.

After leaving the Turtles at the base of their rock, Abanak went quickly to the edge of the island, his spine prickling with sweat that lingered from their climb.

Not all the sweat had come from exertion. Much had come from fear.

He listened, waiting to learn why the tower had troubled his guiding voice so.

A stream of fog slipped up the edge of the cliff.

The voice moved in his mind.

"You have learned, and you have grown, Abanak. You have been lonely for long enough," it said. "You're ready, now. The river is waiting. Come home."

_The River. _

He watched the moat of fog rising, flowing onto the island in spreading streams.

"Come," repeated the voice. "She's waiting."

Abanak shivered. "What of the Turtles?"

"They'll join you as part of the river, soon," the voice said. "_Come._"

Abanak whispered a prayer of gratitude, tore off his vest, raised his arms from his sides and leaned out. The fog rose to meet him, caught him, and bore him gently out from the camp, beyond the cliff's edge, and downward.

When the rippling song and green scent reached him, he began to weep. The fog left him on the riverbank, where he knelt and stared through his tears.

"Oh, how I've missed you..." he whispered. "Thank you, ancient one!"

After a moment he removed his boots, then waded forward, barefoot and bare-chested, his medicine bag warm against his ribs. Abanak lingered in the water's embrace, letting his fingers brush its soft waves. When he breathed, standing waist-deep in the water, he felt his awareness subside into oneness with the river's being.

It was unlike anything he'd ever felt before.

This river had more than just a will of its own. It had purpose.

It had _hunger_.

Something huge and dark rose up behind him, and the spirit of the Adversary eased against Abanak's body and faded into him.

Then, Abanak realized this river had even more –

It had Mike.

Michaelangelo woke on a slick, cold riverbank, aching from the inside out, a little silty water pooled on the ground beneath his mouth. He slid a hand grey with cracked mud up to touch, gingerly, the swollen, bloody lump at his temple.

The light was soft and diffuse and mysterious. Though it reminded him, as he slowly sat up, of the cool mists of the pond at dawn, he wasn't fooled this time.

"You're lost," a low, almost-familiar voice said.

Mike whipped around, then clutched at his head and waited for the throbbing to stop. He looked up, through the sparkles before his eyes.

Nothing. All he could see was the mist, and the river lapping at his legs. He shoved himself further up the bank and discovered a wall of earth, rising just beyond, disappearing into the fog.

"Hello?" he asked, getting to his feet. His shirt clung to him, cold and damp, and his soaked pants chafed his skin.

"You were supposed to be the pinnacle of the reptiles," the voice continued, with a sinister taint that made him recoil. "But you're a human now."

The mist swirled a little. A long moment passed. "I'm just me," Mike answered.

A shadow moved in the water, out beyond the fog. Something quietly splashed. At the sound, Mike retreated, moving backwards along the damp dirt wall. He limped as fast as he could on a leg swollen with bruising. The ground and the walls were bare of any stick or rock for him to use.

The voice mocked him. "Fleeing already? There's nowhere left for you to go, Mike. Haven't you figured that out, yet?"

The voice seemed to crawl in Mike's head. It was the stuff of every nightmare he'd ever known, thick with greed and cruel with callousness, hungry only for what horrors it could wreak. Every word seemed to drain him, and he couldn't tell why.

His hand scraped clods free from the wall as he stumbled with exhaustion. "Leave me alone," Mike pleaded. It was a child's protest, wrung from the deepest part of himself.

"Leave you alone? Here, in this backwater wilderness? Didn't you get enough of that on the streets of that glorious wreck of a city? I've been watching you, hiding in that cheap little room. Crying all night for your brothers. Doing nothing with the human body you thought you wanted for so long!"

The voice advanced on him as Mike slowed.

"Writing pathetic bar songs. Teaching weak women how to punch. Stuck in a horrible job."

"None of that's true," Mike denied, stopping his retreat.

"Isn't it?"

_No weapons. Nothing. But — _He tore off his shirt and twisted it tight, river water dripping through his fingers. Bits of mud and flakes of black debris stuck to his clammy skin. He put his back to the wall and waited.

The shadow waded closer, sending ripples out to gouge the shore.

"I love my job," Mike affirmed. "I love teaching those women at the gym to find their own strength, inside. I go out at night, I take my guitar and perform – "

"Perform? You're performing every minute, as if you belonged somewhere!"

Mike bared his teeth at that. "I do!"

_Even if it's just a crappy furnished room in Chinatown_.

"But the best performance is that of ... Leonardo." The name was spoken possessively, almost with affection...but the chuckle that followed felt like violin strings stripping to their cores. "Pretending how he hates you."

"If that's pretending, better give the man an Academy Award," Mike snapped, and braced himself more strongly against the wall.

"Oh, I'll give him better than that. I _owe _him," the voice said, its shadow taking form as it drew near shore. "For all that deep, delicious self-pity he carries, steeped in brooding all these years. It gave me nourishment as I crawled from the tower. Helped me grow to new heights of evolution... Gave me voice and power again!"

The mammal thing rose up dripping from the border of the water, and it had changed. Long ago, their weapons had scored the massive, rat-like creature they'd tangled with – weapons it had snapped in turn, along with their limbs, before turning to its next prey. Leo, backed by the claws and scales and fangs of all reptiles, had been the one to finally destroy its body.

But the Adversary had returned, in new, craftier form, its insatiable hunger leering now through the eyes of a human vessel: Abanak.

"What have you done to him?" Mike breathed, staring at the man's eyes and how they had changed. His mind raced, recalling the Great Turtle's words about the Adversary's plans.

_Too late, _he thought. _It got to him already. I've failed _–

"Oh, Abanak's fine," the voice said, through teeth bared in a feral grin. "He's got a river to feed again. And you'll get to help. It's time to grant your fondest desire."

Every hair on Mike's skin stood on end as he faced the man, his expression set and grim.

"Just what...exactly...is that supposed to be?"

"Oh, I think you know. You think you can't wait to get back to your City and your...what was it? 'New life.' But you also can't forget your brothers and how they won't let you share that life with them."

The creature advanced, stepping out of the water. It chanted in a kind of high-pitched sing-song: "They haunt you, you haunt them, and Leo won't make it all better again," it sang.

"Doesn't sound like much of a life to me. Admit it," Abanak said, "you hate Leonardo for what he's done. You'd do anything to make him hurt the way you do. He's already nearly broken, Mike – so why don't you help me take him down the rest of the way. Then I'll let you go home, and you can finally be free."

Mike didn't know when he'd started to growl. "You think I'd sell out my brother?" he flashed. "Guess you don't know me after all."

Drained as he was, he crossed the space between them in less than a second. Mike snapped the shirt out to catch the man's neck, then jerked him face down, pretzel-like, to the ground a moment later.

"It takes more than a body to make a human," Mike snarled, whipping the shirt free to bind Abanak's arms while his knee shoved the man's face into the riverbank. "Let Abanak go or I'll – "

The voice laughed, muffled by the mud.

Abanak broke the bindings with a single rip and threw Mike off with a single heave. The man leaped upon him, then, the weight of a thousand thousand years of loathing pinning Mike down, trapping him so hard the mud squeezed up around his body and he could barely breathe.

"You can't beat me," Abanak laughed. "Help me make it better, Mike – you know how to hurt Leo most. And he wants you to – just to prove him right in all the fears he's fed so long. All you've got to do is stick it to him in the next dream I send you. And all of this will go away!"

"I'm not..." Mike choked out, "...gonna hurt...my brother."

Abanak's face darkened. He got to his feet and kicked the shredded shirt away. "I've been watching you hurt him for two whole years. I helped where I could. A little nudge of self-righteousness for Leo. A little pinch of self-pity for you. Since you never could just leave each other alone and go play. Why stop now?"

Mike tried to push himself up. "Mess with one of us..." he gasped, "you mess with us all."

"What, did you miss the past two years? You picked the wrong team, buddy. I thought you were smarter than that. Now, I'm gonna have to run you through the same set of dreams as them...and it's gonna hurt like hell."

Abanak gave another ugly, unnatural laugh. "Now, to make sure you don't give me any surprises..." He rolled his shoulders, then stepped forward and kicked Mike back, following him down with a stomp.

Something snapped and ground beneath Abanak's bare heel. Purple-starred blackness swarmed at the corners of Mike's sight.

Abanak bent close, the fog swirling around his form, and he ran his fingers down Mike's clenched jaw.

"Come on, Mikey. Last chance. You're human like me, now. With me on your side, and them gone, you can finally, finally be free."

Mike reached for the Great Turtle with all of his being. "Help me," he croaked.

"Listen for the false voices," the Great Turtle echoed, "and find where they are true."

Mike felt the hole open in his consciousness.

He dove through.

Abanak glowed at the sight of the man he'd rendered unconscious on the riverbank.

Just like Ferris's son.

He'd failed to take down Booder as the man's factory fell – the mayor got away after taking a cheap shot.

He'd failed to take down the original Old Man River.

He'd failed to demand the respect of the People, and been shunned for it.

But now, he could stand with power...justified...again.

Michaelangelo. Abanak's own hands had punished him for committing the terrible crime of rejecting his own turtle blood, as Abanak's own People had rejected the Way of their ancient tribe.

He caught himself, minutes later, mind wandering among their many misdeeds.

Something important was happening. Something urgent, that would help him bring punishment to them and to the White Man, as well.

Abanak concentrated, past the headache drilling through his temples.

How had Mike come to be here, instead of lost in the jungle, or back in the real world? Where were his brothers? His thoughts lingered on the Turtles: their strength, their powerful lives.

The voice whispered to him.

"Their power...can be mine?"

Abanak crouched in the mud and listened for guidance. He felt the voice lay hold of his mind, more loosely this time, and drift him up, up through the mist.

High on the edge of the cliff, the Turtles had looped knotted, doubled vines around one of the sturdier trees. Raphael was insisting on going first.

"That thing wants to trash my brother, it's gonna have to go through me, first," he said. "Besides, I'm heavier than either of ya. If this rope'll hold me, it'll hold you."

Abanak felt the river heave as Raph rappelled, fast and near silent, into the chill of the fog, landing maybe 50 yards downriver.

Leo touched down next, then Don. Their voices drifted to Abanak as though they spoke in his own head.

"You guys see anything?" Raph asked.

"The mist's too thick," said Don. "I can barely see my own feet."

"Stay together," Leo said. "We go this way."

The voice whispered to Abanak, close as a lover: "The river is yours. You know what to do."

Abanak slid quietly back from Mike's still form, stepping again into the comfort of the river's waves, feeling them stroke at his bare back and chest, calling for his focus, his strength. He sought that strength in turn, waiting for the truth of the voice's words to become more clear.

It spoke again: "They are ninjas, warriors, a threat to us as we stand today. They serve the Great Turtle, not the spirit of the waters, and will destroy the peace this new river will bring. You must break them, to make them ours."

He sent the fog forward as the Turtles approached.

"Careful!" he heard Don shout as whorls of mist rushed around them.

He let the voice take over until it laughed through Abanak's being, echoing in the chasm, sending chills down the Turtles' necks.

The mammal-thing lifted a hand and the fog swirled clear, revealing Mike's limp frame cast on the mud of the riverbank just a short run from his brothers.

"Can you believe," Abanak called, "he tried to follow you all the way to the Great Turtle's tower, as though he still belongs with _reptiles_?"

"Mike!" Raph lunged forward, but Don caught his arm and held him back. Fog slid back into the space between the Turtles and Michaelangelo.

"Stay together," Don warned.

"He's mine, now. It's the mammal blood. Brought him straight home to daddy."

Leo's katanas sliced the mists as he drew them from their sheathes. "It's you we came for, Adversary," he declared. "I beat you once. I'll kill you again."

"Leo, Leo, Leo!" the voice mocked. "Do you really think you can defeat me with those? You think I learned _nothing_ from our last little tango?"

Fog whirled against Don and Raph, disorienting, and the creature drove forward, faster than Abanak had ever moved in his life. The motion scared him in some deep part of his core, even as he shoved Leo back against the cliff with all the force of the Adversary, twisting the Turtle's arms until the swords fell free.

Leo kicked out, breaking the man's grip, but had no time for more. The man retreated into the water impossibly fast, the Turtle's swords gripped in his own hands.

Leo dropped to his knees with a cry, clutching one wrist.

Abanak stood with new resolve. The coldness that had radiated out of Leo at Abanak had confirmed it.

They were _not_ friends. The Turtles were threats to the river. But their energies left him feeling electrified.

That power would have to be...he struggled for the right words...transferred? Pulled in? Absorbed?

The voice supplied them: "Sucked dry."

"Abanak!" Raph roared, ripping free of a patch of heavy mist and snarling with frustration. "Abanak, come here and fight!"

Don stumbled through the fog, found Leo and dropped to his side. He felt the wrist Leo cradled. "Broken," Don pronounced, yanking off his headband and binding the bent limb as Leo gritted his teeth.

"It's just toying with us," Don muttered as he worked. "We've got to take it down at its source."

"Terrific, Donnie!" Raph snapped. "Gonna clue us in as to how to actually do that?"

Don turned, still crouched, and drew a handful of shuriken from his belt. He whipped them in a fan pattern across the river, toward the voice. Abanak dodged.

"There," Don said, pointing to where they had heard him splash. Raphael hit the water.

"Wait!" Leo yelled. "No!"

They heard the water swallow Raphael.

Abanak laughed and charged. As he reached the bank, Don blocked with his bo staff, protecting his injured brother. But the Adversary seized the weapon with a grip of steel and turned it against the Turtle, flinging Don through the air and against the cliff.

Dirt and rocks rained down from the impact, and part of the cliff began to collapse.

Leo leapt to get clear, but the surge of stone and sand caught him, burying his legs and carapace in the landslide. His good arm was jammed under his plastron, his shoulders barely clear.

Behind him, he could sense how the earth crumbled further with every move Don managed, filling in the tiny spaces he created, pinning him ever more firmly. Deep underwater, Raphael, too, struggled against the crushing grip of the current.

"Raph! Don!" Leo shouted in anguish.

Neither surfaced.

Abanak stepped closer.

"I've waited for this, Leonardo," the voice said. "You destroyed my body. You stole the Great Turtle from me, and all his sorrows. You thought to starve me, while you played through your one little lifetime.

"But it's the connection to you that's kept me alive. You showed me the world beyond this jungle, a world full of all the descendants of the ancient reptiles, still living! Today! All I need is one more boost from your delicious brothers and you, and I'll have all the energy I need to enter that world.

"Now, Leonardo, for the death you tried to deal me... It's time to pay the piper!"

Abanak's hands closed on either side of Leo's head like a vise. The shadow of the Adversary moved through his hands, turning greedy as the trapped Turtle fought. The mammal-thing sucked thirstily at his spirit, transforming the grief inside Leo to raw power as it drank.

The sensation reminded Abanak of something...

He felt the taint of Leonardo's sorrows flowing into his own blood.

This whole _river_ felt like Raphael's leech...

But the voice only whispered through him:

"Time for another dream."


	10. Chapter IX Wake

**IX. Wake**

After 18 months, 18 days and 18 hours, Mike came back.

Leo kept an eye on the antique Felix the Cat clock in April's back hall, feeling superstitious. He waited for the ticking paw to strike the 18th minute, half-expecting a burst of doors shattering in through their frames and the explosions of glass and bullets and lives.

But nothing worse happened than April sending him a look of pity as he stood by the back window, polishing his swords.

"I'm proud of you for being here," she told him, pausing in the dark rear hall to set a pumpkin pie out to cool. "He's glad you're here, too, you know. We all are. Just let me know if you need anything."

"I'm fine," he said, as she headed back toward the warmth and laughter of the kitchen – laughter growing less forced as the hours passed. "I'd only ruin everybody's fun."

She stopped, almost to the doorway, and turned back to him. "Leo," she said, "it doesn't have to be this way."

"I'm not going to get into this argument, April," he told her. "I'm sorry. _Gomen nasai._"

He'd been through it before, with her and with Don, the only ones who had dared to keep bringing Mike up. But Don hadn't done so in more than a year. Shadow ignored Leo, as she had except for a few hot insults since the night Mike went away. Raph and Casey pretended nothing changed, but all through their joking and training and movie watching and projects, there lurked an absence in their eyes that frustrated him to the core.

And so it was only April who still challenged him openly, now and again, prodding him to read Mike's letters or to reach out and send one of his own.

"It would be the same as telling him to come home," Leo kept explaining, patient only because his respect for her was more deep-seated, even, than his anger. "_He_ chose to make it so that can never be."

And yet, here Mike was. Making Christmas dinner. Tousle-haired, light-talking, quick and half the time caught in a laugh, moving as easily around the kitchen as if he'd never gone away.

And also...

Sounding different. His voice had softened, holding less resonance without the shell to bounce against.

Smelling different. Thinner skin and fresh-washed hair overpowered the sweat-tang Leo had forever known.

And bearing more than food and presents this holiday.

Mike carried on his heels capture, torture, death.

_Why_ couldn't anyone else _see_?

Leo exhaled sharply. He knew the answer. None of the others of his family had fallen into ambush the way he once had. None of them had been dragged, broken, leaving a trail of blood for their enemies, the Foot Clan, to trod into the dirty snow, as he had that endless Christmas night.

He still remembered how it felt to slowly realize, through a haze of pain, where those enemies were taking him. He remembered understanding, suddenly, that the Foot knew exactly where to strike where it would hurt the hardest – without even touching his already-ravaged body. They would strike the place Leo had left just an hour before they found him, with its strung lights and its busy kitchen and the promise of presents under the tree, and the five beings most dear to him in all the universe gathered, innocent of the destruction about to be wreaked. He remembered becoming air-borne, knowing even as he crashed through the glass of April's window that nothing he could do would save them, now.

None of his family knew what such guilt felt like. None of them should ever know that violation of peace. Yet Mike's every decision laid them bare to such horrors.

The worst part was, from the moment Mike had gone off to those scientists, Leo was helpless again. Nothing he did could truly protect any of his family, much less Mike himself.

If those scientists hurt his brother or held him captive or sold him to the government or black-market dealers... If something went wrong with the process – and hadn't April hinted that something actually had?... If the doctors ever let slip what they'd done... Mike, unprotected in the weakened human form he chose, would have no one to fight alongside or to back him up, and no one, should the worst come to pass, to die with.

Because Leo could do nothing to help Mike without risking the rest of the people he loved. Mike had forced his brother to have to make that choice. At least cutting their ties kept the danger at arm's length. If only April and the others would give in and relocate someplace safe!

Mike wasn't holding up his end of the bargain: to disappear and at least try to protect the rest of the family. Leo's fingers pinched the oiled chamois strip, as another shout of not-quite-familiar laughter from the kitchen grated through his system.

A shadow fell on the window. He wheeled, the tip of his katana chipping the pane.

Outside, Raphael dropped to the chill steel landing of the fire escape, then stepped forward and pushed his palms against the glass, shoving the window up.

"You gonna put that thing away?" Raph asked, brow raised, and leapt indoors, shaking already-melting snow off his feet. "Man, it smells good in here. Pumpkin, huh?"

Raph stuck a finger in the hot, thick pie, and brought it to his mouth, just as Mike stepped into the hall. "Thought you'd be doing that," Mike said. "Some things never cha-"

Leo shut the window behind himself and moved swiftly up the fire escape stairs. Climbing into the fog.

When he reached the rooftop, he found Mike waiting.

"So that's what it's all been about, huh?" the former Turtle said. "Geeze, Leo. You've been carrying that kind of fear around all this time?"

Leo tightened his grip on his swords, scanning for enemies in the wintry mists. "How did you get up here so quickly?" he demanded.

Mike shook his head. "Come on, Leo. Wakey, wakey. We're not actually on this roof. I can't believe I'm getting the hang of this dream thing before you..."

Leo hesitated.

Bending down, Mike lifted a handful of the snow. It ran from his fingers as water, leaving a dirty green stain on the slushy roof. Mike looked back up. "Remember?" he asked.

Leo shuddered, too much coming back, too fast.

"The Adversary," he whispered.

"Yeah... He wants me to stab you in the back out here or something, make his job a little easier."

Leo raised a brow. "Well?"

Mike tensed. "Come on, Leo! You can't actually think I'd want to hurt you!"

Leo bowed his head, trying to recalibrate himself. He moved to the edge of the roof, searching for a way out. "Then how do we get back?"

"Haven't figured that out, yet." Mike paced a little, forcing his shoulders to come down and the angry boil of his heart to subside. Tilting his head, Mike looked thoughtfully at his brother. "But, I think I understand something else, now."

"And that is?" Leo asked the alley.

"The Adversary said you were performing all this time. That's it, isn't it? That's the thing the false voice said that's actually true. You don't want me dead. You just...want to keep us all safe."

His brother turned slowly.

"Want you dead?" he echoed.

"Yeah..." Mike watched nervously, as his brother stared. "I mean...that is...unless you actually do."

Leo closed his eyes. "Why," he said, his voice haggard, "did you make me have to choose who'd die?"

Mike blinked. "Leo..."

His brother turned away, expression desolate.

"You don't have to protect us," Mike said to his back. "I know you told Splinter you would – "

"I vowed," Leo hissed.

"But we're all grown-ups, bro. Seriously, Leo. What is it, making you fight me so hard?"

The blades trembled above the snow, reflecting the dark green current of a river. Leo slid his katana back into their sheathes and looked out on the City.

"Who am I without you?" Leo asked in a miserable voice.

He turned back, his eyes truly meeting Mike's for the first time since his brother became human. Mike felt his breath catch at the raw loneliness in Leo's eyes. He knew that anguish. He knew that pain. His heart rushed for forward.

The fog closed on them. Mike fought against it, grasping for Leo, struggling to reach his brother and still hold on to himself.

He found Splinter's cool hands between his clutching, three-fingered ones. A single candle lit the darkness of the master's room. Clouds obscured both moon and stars outside, and no snow had yet fallen to brighten the chilly, leaf-scattered farmhouse lawn and hills.

Mike sat up as his sensei's breathing changed. He watched the flame's reflections in the pools of Splinter's eyes as they opened. "Master?" he asked, voice hoarse with long watching and worry.

"Michael..." his sensei said. "I asked for you..."

"Yes." Mike shifted uncomfortably. "Don let me know."

But when he'd come in, alone at his sensei's request, Splinter had already fallen asleep. For a horrible moment, Mike had thought he was too late. The idea seemed almost silly, now, watching the brightness in his adopted father's eyes and listening to the warmth in his voice. Of course this strange weakness would pass. Of course their sensei would grow hale again, and grouch at their attentions, and fully recover.

"I have loved watching you grow," Splinter told him. "You have such gifts."

Mike snagged a cloth from the bedside and leaned over to wipe, carefully, when his master coughed.

"But you are ready, now, for more. You've been ready for some time. You must – " he coughed again, brushed away Mike's hand. "You must find the way to share yourself, and those gifts, or I have truly failed."

"No, master! No way could you fail."

"Ah." The frail hand squeezed, softly. "You are too kind, my son."

"But...sensei, I don't understand. What is it you want me to share?"

Splinter's eyes widened. He turned his head to stare at him. "Yourself!" he barked. "Your skills, your dreams. You are wilting like a tree in a too-small pot, Michaelangelo. Trust yourself to find the next size up, and the next, or you will never grow high enough to brush the heavens!"

The coughing lasted so long Mike nearly called his brothers in panic. But Splinter caught his arm and ordered against it.

And Splinter was, even now, master.

"What are you saying?" Mike said finally, when the room was quiet.

"We," Splinter whispered, "are not enough for you. And each of you must find your own paths, now."

Mike shook his head, fiercely. "You're all I want. You, an' Don-n-Raph-n-Leo, and April and Casey and Shad. You're my family, master! Don't...don't send me away."

But something in his heart began to pull.

The hand trembled as it rose up and out. Splinter drew him gently down, until Mike rested on the elderly rat's narrow chest, head nestled under the master's chin. The Turtle slung an arm across his sensei in an awkward hug, listening to the rapid heartbeat beneath the blanket, trying to stop the leak of his tears.

"I would never send you away, my son," Splinter told him. "I will only ask that you and your brothers be true to who you each are, this lifetime. Donatello, Leonardo, Raphael – each of them has done so. But I see your soul has not yet grown...still waiting for you to find who you truly are."

"I'm being who I truly am!" he protested. "Training, and taking care of Shadow, and cooking for everyone, and – "

"That is doing, not being," Splinter said sharply. "And worse: doing for others. Who are you, really? Who are you, Michaelangelo, when all of us are gone? Who are you when your chores are complete and studies are done and there is nothing more for you to _do_?"

Mike lay, troubled, with his master's breath and heartbeat sounding through his ears and his heart. After awhile, the gnarled hand came up to stroke the back of his head, with a familiar tenderness and rhythm he couldn't bear to imagine living without.

"I don't know," he admitted. "I never think about trying to be – without you."

Splinter sighed. "You became more than a simple turtle for a reason, Michaelangelo. Find the purpose. Just as did they."

Taking a deep breath, Mike pulled his head back so he could see his master's face. "Sensei, what was _your_ reason for becoming more?"

Splinter closed his eyes. "Don-n-Raph-n-Leo..." he echoed with a smile. "And you. So you all _could_ be more."

Mike looked up as Leonardo walked around him and knelt on the far side of the low bed, Donatello and Raphael trailing behind. Mike swiped fast at his eyes...and stared at his hand, suddenly five-fingered again.

"Guess I got the hang of it," Leo explained. "I found the others," he added, unnecessarily.

"We all must be out cold," Mike said, dismayed.

Don nodded – but Raph just stared at their sleeping master.

"So this is what got you started on going human," Don said, watching Splinter breathe. "It wasn't just some impulsive decision? You really had to walk away from us to fulfill your path, find who you were..."

Leo leaned forward. "And the only way to find your path was by becoming human? Going above ground? Walking in that world?"

"Y-yeah," Mike answered. Swallowed, collected himself. "Yeah. It was. But I didn't know it would hurt you guys so badly." He looked down at Splinter, then gently moved the furred arm back into place and tucked the blanket up. "I'm sorry."

Leo sighed. "I didn't know it hurt you so much to risk it all...and then stay away."

"Not that we didn't point it out," Don pointed out.

Raph lay a hand on their master's shoulder.

"It's okay," Mike told them.

Don took Splinter's fingers and warmed them in his own. "He was gone by that morning, wasn't he?" he asked.

"Yeah," said Mike. "I wish he was still here."

They sat for a quiet minute: three Turtles, a rat and a human.

"How are we gonna beat that thing, guys?" Raph asked, turning away. "I think I'm running out of breath, back in that river."

Leo straightened.

"We beat it," he said – and this time when he met Mike's eyes, they held their old focus – "by striking as one."

The flow of lonely agonies slackened. Shifted. Broke altogether.

The voice snarled.

Abanak's hands dropped to close around Leo's throat as the Adversary's hunger retreated, disappointed, unslaked.

"Wake up!" the voice shouted, as Abanak shook the Turtle in frustration. "You're supposed to be grieving! Your master is dead! Your brothers are dead! Look, look!"

Abanak wheeled and opened one hand for a sweeping gesture. The mists slipped backward and the river currents shifted, water from the shallows draining away as they curved out from shore, leaving a staining green scum. Twenty feet out, Raph lay tumbled on the riverbed. "See? Dead and gone!" Rock and earth tumbled aside from the avalanche, next, revealing Don's twisted body. He forced Leo's head around to see it. "Now it's just you and me!"

"I wouldn't be so sure," Leo coughed as the man let go. "We Turtles're just full of surprises."

A hard right caught Abanak under the ear, followed by a choking elbow and a spinal pinch. The man arched like a fish in Mike's arms.

"Former turtles, too," Leo amended.

The Adversary rolled with all its power, sending Mike sprawling.

"I'll crush you!" the voice screamed as Mike hit the ground with a cry. "I'll take you to pieces!"

Leo fought both the exhaustion of the dreams and the dirt still forcing him down. Something cracked sharply – it took him a moment to realize it wasn't one of his own pinned bones. Mike's shout of pain gave it away. Then there were more.

He saw Raph get to his feet and stumble for the bank, still coughing green water and heaving for breath. That brother paused only once – to snatch up the katanas half-buried in the sand. Leo could hear Don clambering out of the dirt behind him, crawling toward the fight with some fresh injury of his own.

As Leo wrenched himself free of the rocks, a harsh jolt to his broken wrist nearly putting him under, the thought rose in his mind that they had, perhaps, underestimated the situation.

They'd managed to wake each other from the dreams. But they had no circle. The only river stones lay beneath now-raging waters, aligned against them. The fog dropped again, pounding the Turtles and Michaelangelo, whirling like a hurricane, leaving them blind.

Then Don, moving on hands and knees, leaned into him. Leo gritted his teeth and shoved forward with him, shouting for Raph. Their brother reached them and passed over the swords. "Get to Mike!" Leo cried, clutching one katana in his good hand.

The Adversary struck him from the side. Leo stabbed outward as he fell, bracing against the ground. Abanak howled.

Leo scrambled backward as Raph dove over him in a head-on, sai-first attack that took the Adversary down.

Then Raph sailed back over Leo in a shell-first, snarling retreat.

As Don slashed through the mist with Leo's other blade, earning strikes of his own, Leo heard a groan just beside him. He reached out and seized his brother's limp hand.

" – do this – " Mike gasped.

Leo understood, dropping his sword as Don rolled back against him. "Donnie, now!" he said, as Raph joined them.

They linked hands, Leo biting down against the red flare from his wrist.

The Turtles focused. Inhaled as one.

Grey clouds hung low over the snowy rooftops, lit with a softer, more colorful glow than usual for a New York City evening. Even here, in Chinatown, the lights seemed friendlier this night.

The Turtles and Mike listened and stared and waited for the Adversary.

Something all black and shadowy slipped from one hiding place to another – but they saw.

A Foot ninja. He signaled, and another joined him.

The sight made them turn, slowly, as understanding dawned, until all three brothers were staring at Leo with expressions torn between horror and concern.

"This wasn't exactly what I had in mind," Mike whispered.

Their leader watched as the pair of warriors leaped at them, katanas hissing out of their sheathes.

"Don't move," he told his brothers.

The ninja landed several feet away and began sparring in the air. Gradually, the sound of clashing metal grew, and the Turtles could see a shadowy figure taking form.

It was Leo...a much younger Leo.

The teen held his own. He lost the tail ends of his bandanna, but dispatched both soldiers shortly after on the trampled, now-bloody snow. Then he dodged a trio of throwing blades that whistled at him through the harsh air. In their wake, he tangled successfully with a chain-wielding ninja.

The younger Leo was fast. Confident.

He moved like shafts of light through water.

Mike shuddered as he watched the enemy's smooth black face mask, its rounded eye shields giving the Foot the look of an alien – inhuman ­– a living embodiment of murder.

Leo tossed him, and the ninja slid 10 feet across the slick rooftop, then dashed for the edge and leaped over.

The younger Leo followed, paused to sheathe his katanas, and swung over the ledge in pursuit.

"What do we do?" Don asked.

"Go after him. Go with him," Raph said, stepping forward. "Help him, this time."

"There's nothing you can do to help him," Leo said shortly. "This is already done. Happened long ago." He watched the rooftop and the buildings surrounding them. "We have to take this battle to – what did you call it earlier, Don? The source?"

His brother nodded. "The Adversary..."

Leo touched each of them briefly, for reassurance – they couldn't tell if it was for them or for him – then closed his eyes. They waited, watching, feeling the silent demand he sent through the wintry landscape.

On the fifth breath, he turned.

Abanak stood at the edge of the roof where the Foot and the younger Leonardo had vanished. "Trying to ignore this dream, huh?" the Adversary taunted. "Can't bear to let them see what it was really like that night, can you?"

"Leo's got nothing to hide!" Don said, stepping forward.

"Everyone's got something to hide!"

The sounds of battle – strikes, thuds, metal hitting wood or bone – echoed up from the alley.

"Let's take him," Mike said, reaching over to snag one of Raph's _sai_.

"There were three down there..." Leo said quietly. "One got a blade into my shoulder, right up against the shell. Another trapped my katana and cut off the end."

"Leo," Raph said warily.

"Stay with us," Mike added.

Their leader looked up, suddenly, scanning the rooftops. "There – " he pointed. A trio of Foot armed with arrows and bows had appeared a block away. Leo started to run, away from where the Adversary leaned. "Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we _can_ help."

"Leo! Dammit!" Raph charged after, Mike on his heels.

Don stood for a moment facing their enemy. "I know what you're doing," he said.

"Donatello," it said lovingly, running a too-long tongue around Abanak's lips. "The Great Turtle's wannabe shaman. I look forward to draining you."

"I know what you're doing, and you're going to fail," Don repeated calmly, as snow began to fall. "You can't turn us against him, no matter what he did wrong."

The Adversary snarled amusement.

Don dashed after his brothers. He found them watching the Foot archers jog away, Leo looking frustrated and helpless.

"They just faded around our strikes," he complained.

"You already said it. We can't change the past," Don said, taking their leader's shoulder.

"Holy – " Raph called from the far end of the roof. "Never woulda believed it. I gotta give you credit, Leo."

They joined him, gazing down on the street busy with Chinatown traffic and shoppers and couples walking in the snow. "Check it out," Raph said, pointing.

Someone walked below them with a familiar purposeful gait, draped in a damp, mold-spotted canvas, following a broad-shouldered fighter deeper into Chinatown.

Leo. Letting the fight draw him into the open.

"I didn't know you'd gone after them on the street," Mike said wonderingly.

"I should have turned back after the archers..." Leo said, his voice low. "Should have seen it was a trap, gone back for you."

Several men in cloaks moved out of shadows to tail their brother up the street.

"We'd have geared up with you and gone out looking for them," Don interrupted. "Without a clue what we were really up against."

Mike started to nod. "We'd have ended up fighting them out in the open. With so many of them coming at us, they'd have separated us, taken us down one by one. Probably Casey wouldn't have seen us and come to help. Shredder – he might have actually won."

"And that would have left April and Master Splinter at the apartment, alone," finished Raph.

They watched as the two trailing ninja suddenly flung weapons at the teenage Leo. He spun to deflect them with his undamaged blade, but the projectiles parted easily around the steel, crashing into his face: snowballs.

Mike whistled with surprise. "Whoa, Leo! You lost the cloak!?"

"Look at you," Raph admired as the younger Leo swiped his eyes clear and charged into battle against their swords. "Look at that grin. You were loving this."

Leo's hands tightened on the edge of the rooftop. "I thought I was invincible," he said.

When the battle led Leo around a street corner, Raph took off up the block, chasing the action. The brothers followed, keeping one eye out for Abanak.

Down below, Leonardo moved along a wooden construction fence. He halted as a Foot ninja appeared at the far end, one katana held at the ready.

Another stepped into place behind Leonardo. Leo prepared, turning to stand with arms extended, ready for either's attack.

From their high vantage point, his brothers and older self saw what he could not: Foot coming up the back of the fence behind him with chains, ready to fling them around the Turtle's arms.

Dozens and dozens of armed ninjas waited in the construction pit below.

"I didn't...want you...to have to see this," Leo said.

"Because he knows that even then, even at that point, he could have quit grandstanding and gotten away," the Adversary mocked, a few yards away. "But the fool wanted to show off what a talented little ninja he was."

Leo didn't spare him a glance, his eyes riveted to the scene below. "I was 16, dammit!"

"We all made mistakes, Abanak!" Mike burst in. "At April's that night, I was too busy worrying about dinner to realize my brother was out way too late, getting himself nearly dead. And you! Old Man River had you fooled but good, once, didn't he!"

Wooden boards shattered below, as yet another ninja used a flying kick to send the trapped Leo crashing backward through the fence.

Mike ignored the sounds. "So Leo had to learn the hard way that even he can't win every battle. Not alone. At least he learned."

Turtle and ninjas tumbled two stories to the snow-covered mud of the pit. Leo came up snarling, dripping with filth, chains dangling from his forearms and fists.

"And I think he's figured out," Mike said, "that just because he can't protect us from everything doesn't make him any less our brother...or our leader."

The Foot swarmed into a rough circle around the Turtle – then stopped, parting at their center to make way for the Turtles' lifelong enemy to step through.

The Shredder – the one they had thought dead – waited with menacing confidence in his deadly costume of razor-sharp blades.

The younger Leo went still as he finally realized:

On this Christmas night, he faced his own death.

He gathered himself.

And charged.

On the rooftop, Leonardo pulled himself away. He caught Mike's eye and gave him a tiny, wry smile.

"As we were taught, my brothers," he said then, in Japanese.

They gathered.

Abanak, unlike his intended prey, made a small sound as recognized his own death in the brothers' eyes.

They charged.

Mike reached him first, and slammed the butt end of Raph's sai against the Adversary's borrowed skull.


	11. Chapter X Kin and Kind

**X. Kin and Kind**

The tribe had thrived in his absence. Abanak, footsore and hungry, stared at the circle of low-roofed, modern log houses. They circled the sacred grounds of the land Ferris had once threatened, smoke trailing gently into the air from hand-built sweat lodges behind each home. Laundry hung beside drying skins on lines between the trees.

"Peter?" someone asked.

He looked over, dazed.

"It _is_ you! Peter — I mean, Abanak... We gave you up for lost, long ago!"

"Uncle," he croaked.

"Come," his uncle said, tugging him into a fierce embrace.

The tribe had indeed done well, Abanak learned. Even as elders passed on, the younger generation grew more determined not to let the old ways die with them. With the help of college educations, they returned to the hills with knowledge of how to fight the crooked landowners for the People's rightful share, how to apply for grants to preserve the Way, how to create sustainable practices that protected their lands and waters, how to run businesses that both honored their heritage and ensured their financial security.

"You may not believe this, but you were missed," his uncle's new wife told him. "They know you were closest to the old ways and fiercest in protecting us from men like old Booder. We've all wondered what happened when you went away so long."

He bowed his head over the venison and beans they served, uncertain, still, how to make his tongue share how he truly felt.

"You'll stay, won't you?"

He did. He enjoyed spending time with the young ones, teaching the old games and arts, from weaving to painting to telling the ancient stories. He listened with admiration to the plans for managing the tribe's new fishery just off the Connecticut River, and how they hoped to share and invest the proceeds. He learned with alarm, then cautious approval, of the partnerships that now joined the white forces in Booders Falls and the county with the strengths of the People, providing for both education and environmental management. He took part in the traditional pow-wow that November, which drew hundreds of people from tribes throughout New England, plus white vendors and drummers and families with children.

He chastised a group of young whites who gathered to hear one of his stories, when they started folding their legs beneath them and shouting to each other to sit "Indian style."

"Native Americans sat however was comfortable," he told them, sharply.

His uncle, beside him, shook his head. "Thank you, children, for seeking to honor the heritage of your storyteller. Someday, perhaps, you will learn more of our true customs and histories, just as we seek to learn yours. Would you like that?"

The children nodded and cheered.

"Then let's begin with a story about how the world came to ride on the back of an enormous turtle – Abanak?"

He scowled at his uncle.

This time from shame.

Late one night, Abanak stood alone beside the last embers of the council fire, glaring at the smoke-wreathed stars above.

"The People have done more in 10 years than I accomplished in a lifetime," he cursed. "They are more worthy of the River than I ever was!"

For awhile, there was no answer but his own self-loathing.

Then –

"They make little difference. They are still subject to the whims of the powerful ones," the voice assured. "_You_ are the only one with the gift of true mastery, of control. They only know how to serve and to play the games of the White Man."

Abanak turned the words over in his mind, then thought back to the vision of simply waiting out the White Man's ravages. "What use is mastery when there is nothing but a dead river left to control?" Abanak demanded.

The voice went low. "Show them how they will fail, Abanak," it said. "Tell the People about the truth of the River, and how you were once one with her waters. Tell them how it's too late, how only the passing of this age will free the River from the poisons. Only a real Algonquin can handle such truth. You will see how they fall short, how their efforts will turn to naught."

"And if they do understand?" he asked. "And strive anyway, with these dreams of partnership and connection with our old enemies, to succeed? Perhaps they are more true Algonquin than even I."

"Then the River will never let you return."

To his dismay, Abanak found he had guessed right. At the council fire the next week, he shared the story of his long absence and what he had learned of the River and its damaged waters. And the People accepted what he shared.

"It is true," his uncle said. "The stories tell us, and the feelings in our own hearts show us, that the spirits of the waters and the trees and the animals and the lands exist like individual flames that all come together to form the Great Spirit – the one great blaze and light born from a million, million smaller lights. Thank you for this gift, Abanak. You show us again that by protecting each little piece of land and water that comes under our care, we help in some way to defeat the harm being done to this whole, one Earth."

Abanak looked at his uncle with full eyes, and wonder.

"He's a fool," said the voice. "It will never be enough."

The shaman rose then. "If you were one with the River," he asked, "how came you to be here? If you took the place of her ancient guide, what led you to abandon her after a few brief years?"

He lowered his head. "She said...she no longer had need of me."

"The River rejected you?"

Abanak's shoulders tensed and he glared into the fire, ignoring them.

First the shaman, and then the whole tribe, turned against him.

"Go forth," they told him. "Leave this place for now. You must find your true path."

The voice had been sympathetic as he pulled on his worn pack yet again to go he knew not where.

"The Turtles helped you find your destiny once," it suggested as he reached the highway. "Perhaps they will help you again. It's time for us to find the valley."

"What valley?"

"I will show you."

In a foul, fog-bound canyon in the heart of that valley, the Turtles broke on him harder than any wave.

Their oneness struck Abanak even before the physical blow, jarring his connection with the river and the voice.

This was unity.

This was bonding.

Abanak flung up his hands to protect himself and they took it as opportunity, battering his exposed chest and stomach, knocking out his knees, grinding their fists and weapons into the spaces between his ribs and vertebrae until he collapsed on the cold riverbank. All the strength of the voice within him was nothing against such targeted assault.

This river's infinite, fogbound loop upon itself, gnawing the walls of its canyon, felt endlessly inadequate now in the face of such completion

Raphael – he thought it was Raphael, from the bulk – got him around the throat. That kicked his instincts in, and Abanak thrashed and struck out and tried to bite. The elbow only tightened beneath his chin, and Raphael's arm squeezed.

Someone forced his arms behind his back and knelt on them; someone else caught his legs.

Stars wheeled around the edges of his vision. He thought he could hear, in the distance, the voice of an old woman chanting across a crackling fire.

He felt an awful wrenching, and something seemed to release from deep within his core. That Something rose through his spine, burning its way out the skin of his back. One of the Turtles rolled off his shoulders, out of the way.

"Holy – what the heck was – "

"Don't let go!"

Abanak squeezed his eyes shut, then forced them open, willing himself to see beyond the spiraling purple dragging him downward.

The Something clambered free of his body and stood facing them. It was all black shadow and foul mists and hulking, hairy power.

"The Adversary!" Don yelled. "Watch out!"

Leo charged in. "Take him out, guys!"

The grip on his neck released. Abanak gasped for breath – and in awe.

The Turtles had gone into action.

There were only two of them – Leo with one blade, keeping his injured arm guarded against his plastron, and Raph, holding a sai in one hand and the twin of Leo's sword in the other. But they moved like creatures possessed: swift, swarming, blades flashing faster than the eye could follow as the shadow creature raged.

"Back off!" the voice snarled from what passed for its mouth, and Abanak reeled.

That was _the _voice. The one that had guided him so long. This thing, then, was the source he had turned to from as far back as his days with the River? He started to struggle up, but felt himself jerked back to the mud by the Turtle still sprawled across him. A staff pressed into the back of his neck.

"Don't even think about it," Donatello warned. "I may have a busted leg, but it takes just two inches of leverage to snap your spine."

The monster roared and swatted at the ninjas. They fell back. But one of the Turtles struck home, and a limb, trailing blood and black vapor, splattered to the ground.

Abanak's eyes widened as the mammal-thing staggered back toward him. Leo leapt between the creature and Don, but it was ready, slamming its fists through the air and knocking Leo aside.

The voice – the Adversary – lurched another step forward. The bo staff rose and Don came up into defensive position, one knee driving into the center of the man's back.

"Abanak," the mammal-thing roared. "Raise the river! It is your destiny! Drown the Great Turtle's minions or we are lost! Do it now, or lose the waters forever – "

Crawling to his feet, Leo called a warning. "Donnie, knock him out!"

Abanak held up a hand. "No need, Turtles!" he said. "I won't do that – _thing's_ will."

At his words, the Adversary shrugged off a tackle from Raph and lunged forward. He snagged Abanak by one shoulder and yanked him out from under Don's weight. Abanak shouted in terror, and then the man was airborne, flailing through the fog until he struck the base of the cliff and fell stunned.

"You're a man, a mammal!" the voice bellowed, advancing on him. "_My_ kind! You belong to _me_! You do _my_ will!"

Dimly, Abanak made out the shape of the Adversary as it smashed a pursuing Leo backward – then paused. "And you, too, are mine," it snarled, stooping to drag Mike's prostrate form up with its remaining arm.

The former Turtle cried out at the fresh violence to his damaged chest. But instead of fighting, Mike clung to the stinking limb.

"Mike! Get out of there!" Don yelled. "He'll kill you!"

Abanak stared as the grimacing former Turtle clawed his way, determined, up the monster's body, resisting its efforts to shake him loose.

"I'll crush you!" the mammal-thing thundered and lunged for the wall.

"Move, Leo! Take 'im down!" Raph raged.

He and his brother closed again. Just shy of smashing Mike between its hulking form and the cliff wall, the mammal-thing arched, howling as their blades sank into its back.

The strike gave Mike the angle he needed to reach the Adversary's face. "You might be kin," he gasped, clinging to its filth-ridden throat, "but you can't handle bein' family." He gripped the matted fur on either side of the mammal-thing's head and forced its black, beady, vicious eyes to meet his own.

Mike sank like a stone in the maelstrom of mental violence, swallowed by the maw of the Adversary's cravings. He resisted the visceral urge to curl into a ball against the creature's soul-sucking appetites. But – he felt a spark of hope – he'd guessed right. That hunger wasn't directed at him. It merely devoured Mike's consciousness, drawing him down, calling him to join in the feasting on reptiles.

Of all his brothers, he was the one the creature didn't have a way to _eat_. It could only _use_ him. And failing that, let him swim in its wretched cauldron of reptilian miseries forever.

"Gonna rip you apart, you lousy parasite," Mike spat against the fear. "Gonna take you down from the inside out..."

He drove himself through the labyrinthine tendrils of wickedness and self-delusion twisting through the creature's psyche, digging, hunting, ignoring what the thing offered as temptations. He heard the screams of infant turtles clawed from their shells by ravenous rodents, felt the ground shudder as a dying brontosaurus rolled in efforts to crush the thousand furred creatures swarming and ripping its leathery flesh.

"Where are you?!" he fumed in frustration. "Where's your core? There's gotta be _something_ to you!"

He shoved past a patch of feral lizard loneliness. "Nothing but destruction – " a hatchling fled keening from a weasel-like creature blocking its path to the water, "and chaos," an ankylosaurus cowered, terrified, in a hurricane, "and greed and – " he froze, plunged halfway through a clutch of plundered eggs.

That was it.

The mammal-thing existed, always, in leeching off others. Its entire being _was_ the bloodthirsty feeding.

Mike halted his frustrated search. He stilled himself, focusing his essence deep in what passed for the Adversary's mind.

He reached for the pulse of his brothers. They responded – Don eager, ready, expecting this; Leo surprised for barely a moment before sliding easily into their link; Raph sharing his energy without question – and drew them close, seeking just the right memories.

"Here, you slime-spawn," Mike muttered then, cracking open the instinctive protections that had shielded his inner self so far. "You want something to feed on? Try choking _this_ down."

For three days after their escape from April's, everyone's thoughts centered on Leo. They watched him fight for death on the musty bed they'd piled with blankets at Casey's farmhouse; they felt him desperately seek that release. And yet his terrified brothers would not – could not – allow it...

And so, given no choice in the matter, Leonardo healed.

On the morning of the fourth day he woke. By evening, he was lucid. Splinter listened to his son's breathing, felt the pulse rise through all the channels of his body, and declared him "recovering."

And with that, the brothers fell apart.

Don threw himself into repairs on the badly neglected farm, left four years empty since the death of Casey's grandmother. Raph withdrew to spend his days "doin' projects" with Casey outdoors or in the barn and his nights prowling the farm for any sign of Shredder or his goons. Mike became cold as the constant snows, his eyes dark with grim purpose, training sometimes 20 hours a day with a focus they'd never seen in him before. Leo, the moment he was physically able, fled into the forest to spend his days tracking and hunting – and guarding the farm's perimeter.

None of them seemed capable of meeting each other's eyes – and they could hardly speak with April. She who had opened her heart and her home to a group of mutant ninjas, who at best could offer little in return, had now lost everything because of them.

It was unbearable.

Twice, Leo stood on a hillside watching the dawn and considered not returning.

But they had waited for him to die. He owed them a deathwatch.

And so he stayed, and waited for his family to die.

The Adversary lay sprawled at their feet, tangled with their wheezing brother. Though unconscious, it chuckled now with grisly pleasure – a creature grunting as it savored its latest meal of sorrows.

Its delight was too much for Raphael.

"Gah!" he shouted, wrenching himself free of their circle of lonely memories. He drew his sai and aimed for the mammal-thing's bare-tooth grin. "Let go of 'im, ya spawn!"

Leo caught Raph's arm mid-plunge. "Stop, Raph! Can't you feel it? They're linked! Mammal to man. You'd kill Mike, too. Focus," he urged.

And because it was Mike lying in front of them, and because in his pushy leader's words Raph could hear a raw concern that hadn't been there for nearly two years gone, he drew back the trembling sai. He glanced at Don, who hunched over a bent leg but breathed with meditative focus. Then Raph glared, settled himself defensively at Mike's head, and let his brothers submerge him again.

For months, they strayed in and around the farm, lost and unable to find – or admit – what they searched for.

Then April fell. The ice on the farm's pond had weakened, enough for even her slight weight to crack it one mid-March morning and for the Turtles' dearest friend to plunge through. It was Leo who saw her go down, made the rescue and saved April's life.

As she rested, wrapped in blankets, her feet in a bucket of steaming water, Splinter straightened. He took on an expression of resolve.

"Your spirits have drifted far too long," he told his sons. "Come, we have much to do."

With the tips of the trees turning green with budding leaves and the frozen ground growing grass-studded and soft, the brothers returned to training. Under their master's guidance, as early robins tugged worms from muddy, fallow fields, the Turtles practiced katas as one. The first wildflowers brushed their ankles, as they remembered how to breathe and move in each other's rhythm. Insects hummed in the heat of spring, buzzing as they inspected the strange creatures helping each other scale cliffs, swim gushing streams, track their night's dinner through the hills. The Turtles felt the sun warm their bodies even as the team sparring, stalking and singing warmed their hearts.

They felt what Splinter called their group spirit rise again.

They grieved, finally, together, letting go their guilt even as the last scars of Shredder's vengeance faded from their shells and skin.

Too late, the Adversary saw the closing jaws of the trap. It thrashed and recoiled, trying to fight free of the fellow mammal caught deep in its mind. Mike's loose fingers curled on its smoky, clumped fur, and the former Turtle plunged deeper in.

The smoke of a campfire mixed with the earthy scents of the hollow they'd found, eroded from a low cliff. The Turtles sat comfortably, the day's training a familiar, pleasant soreness in their strengthening muscles, and listened to their master.

"You've done well, my sons," he said. "Your spirit glows bright and pure this night. Although I sense an almost peaceful nature throughout...something still lingers.

"Yes, we were attacked by our past, Leonardo nearly killed..." Splinter told them. "But we all feel the real cost was to April, a burden we shall always bear. Yet our experience teaches us: in all the universe, change is the only constant. Thus, the way of harmony is to accept change. We make our choices in life – and our karma is to accept the changes those choices bring.

"Just as April chose to take us all into her life, she knew there would be changes... I believe that April has gained more by her choice than she has lost...and I believe that she knows this.

"My sons... Life is good; and life goes on."

One day in May, as dawn broke over the hills, the brothers returned from their training. They knocked gently on April's door, and slipped inside.

"Good morning!" they shouted. "Surprise!"

"Breakfast is served, mademoiselle," Mike announced as Leo advanced with a tray, followed by Raph, who carried flowers hidden behind his back.

Don drew open the curtains. "A bit o' sun, milady?" he offered, as April laughed with surprised delight.

They were whole again. They could feel it with the sun's rise.

They were family. They could see it in her smile.

Despite everything that had happened...despite all the lonely hurt of that too-long winter... They were one.

"We're still one..." Mike whispered.

His brothers surrounded him, holding on as the last black wisps of the writhing Adversary faded around Mike's limp form, vanishing with the canyon's fog beneath a now-blazing sun.

The Turtles could feel the death of the Adversary like a leech yanked away, their blood allowed to flow pure again.

"We did it..." Raph marveled.

"We did what needed to be done," Leo said, sword hanging loosely now in his good hand. He watched Abanak's crumpled form a few yards away for any sudden moves.

"Mike, you okay? Can you hear me?" Don pleaded, holding him up as he sat and coughed.

His brother smiled, not yet opening his eyes. "It's really over," he croaked.

"Don't talk," Don said instantly. "You'll only strain your ribs more."

"Heh," Raph chuckled. "You mean all we ever had to do to make him shut up was break his ribs? If I'd known that, I'd have broken 'em years ago."

The joke was weak, but it made them laugh anyway, they were so relieved to still be alive and together.

No, to be together again.

Don felt something, then. A presence just behind his brothers. He looked –

A turtle as huge as a mountain loomed on the heat-cracked mud of the riverbed, where the last of the tainted waters were draining away.

"Oh..." Abanak said weakly from the base of the cliff wall.

Don turned back to see the recognition in the man's eyes, and bet he could guess why the man's expression turned foolish. How could Abanak have mistaken that brutish mammal-thing for a spirit as strong and clear and wonderful as this? The man's shame was almost palpable in the afternoon light.

The Great Turtle's rough shell and scales seemed to glow in the sunlight.

"Abanak," it said.

The man bowed his head.

"You lied to my children. You turned them against each other in my name." The Great Turtle looked at the injured warriors before him. "You even harmed them, here, on behalf of my Adversary."

"I was misled..." Abanak said miserably.

"Indeed. " The spirit moved closer, the huge claws pressing into the drying mud, the heavy pads of his feet sinking deep. "And how easily. You have spent your life isolating yourself, Abanak, setting yourself as the sole owner of truth. It seems you cannot recognize what is truth and what is lie from other beings any longer. Perhaps, not even from yourself."

"No," the man said wretchedly, his forehead pressed to the ground. "I see, now, how I was mistaken. I have become the very tool of my enemies.. Please, Great Turtle, end my shame. Finish me here, that I may stop bringing harm to those I thought to protect."

"Now he's talkin'," Raph growled, preparing his weapon as he crouched next to Mike.

But the Great Turtle only blinked slowly at the man. Abanak wept silently awhile, the Turtles watching as his bare shoulders heaved. A long minute passed.

Nervously, Abanak raised his eyes to meet the dark pools of the spirit's.

"My Adversary offered you dominance of its river," the Great Turtle said. "And in the end, you declined its power. And so, to die now _would _be a punishment, but one too final for you.

"Abanak, your understanding of oneness has always been pale. I charge you: Return to your River, free of the Adversary, clear-minded and bearing all that you have learned from these greatest of my sons. Seek not to stand in the throne at the River's source, this time. Ask that she allow you to become but a single aspect of the whole. Perhaps, if this is something you can do, and do whole-heartedly, it is not too late for you. Perhaps, one day, you can return to your People with real knowledge of what it means to be a master."

"The Great Turtle is wise," Don whispered. Raph gritted his teeth.

"Sure didn't do much to help us along the way," he muttered.

Leo sheathed his sword and watched their ancestral spirit curiously. "I think...he couldn't reach this place until we broke the mammal-thing's power," he said.

"But he did...help," Mike wheezed. "Gave me the strength...to hang on and fight."

Raph sent him a skeptical look.

The Great Turtle turned his head slowly. "You have freed this valley as well as yourselves from the threat of the Adversary's fog," he told them.

"Terrific. That mean we can go home?"

"Raph, could you please pretend you have manners for 20 seconds?" Don snapped.

"You can go home," the Great Turtle assured.


	12. Chapter XI The Terrible Grail

**XI. The Terrible Grail**

The sun gentled.

In a pond in a forest unknown to humans, outside of time, a crowd of hatchling turtles dove and circled in warm, green waters. Some crawled in cool mud, hidden among stalks of thick rushes. Others clambered onto the stubby-limbed, weathered bark of fallen trees to bask among their sleepy-eyed elders. A breeze moved across the surface of the pond, and floating turtles bobbed, their shells and half-submerged heads sending rings and ripples running into each other.

"Wherever your paths lead you...whatever you find you have become...know this belongs to you," the Great Turtle said. "This is your heritage; this your birthright. The warmth and the water, the greening and the growing. Always, my children, you can return to the oneness of our race, waiting here, at the core of your beings."

They felt the comforting press of the mud around their small bodies, swam jubilantly through the wavering golden sunbeams cascading through the pond waters, seemed to soar in flight through the slow-dancing fronds of tender, good-to-taste young reeds.

Life was good...and life went on.

They emerged from dream to find themselves in their abandoned campsite, their gear stowed in the midst of endless jungle once more. The canyon that had circled the island of the tower had vanished, the rent earth healed and tree-covered as though it had never been disturbed.

The shock of transition from infant pond turtles to their current, battered forms came hardest to Mike, whose mud-splattered limbs held the least in common with their idyllic ancestors', and who seemed now to have trouble even taking a breath.

"Hurts," he said through gritted teeth, shivering despite the sun. They could all see the muscles straining in his chest as he coughed, wincing, and struggled to get up. "Feels like...I got sat on...by six trucks."

"Hold still," someone said behind him.A careful hand traced the outlines of his back and chest.

Mike leaned wearily into his brother's touch. "Leo..." he sighed. Gratitude rose like a balm through all the exhaustion and stress: his brother's cool, sure hands bringing comfort again.

"You've got four, maybe five broken ribs," Leo said.

"Guess there really are...advantages...to shells," Mike responded.

"Unh." His brother shifted his exploration to Mike's neck. "You're lucky... It doesn't seem like there's any damage to your spine."

Don grunted as Raph helped splint his leg. "Why is it that every time we encounter the Great Turtle," Don said, "we come away with broken bones? And why do I always break this _same leg_?"

"You only cracked it this time. Quit griping or I'll finish the job," Raph offered.

Don swatted at him.

"Come on, Raph," Leo said, getting to his feet as they finished.

Mike suppressed a cry as he slowly gave in and lay down. Don, still grumbling, pulled himself over to his brother and laid a palm on Mike's bare chest. He went quiet, then, sliding it down to Mike's abdomen. He frowned.

Leo and Raph walked to where Abanak's body lay stunned, a few yards back. Raph hauled the man up to a sitting position, kneeling behind him and pinning his arms. A shallow cut where Leo's blade had scored him began to bleed.

"Are you alive?" Leo demanded, pushing the tip of his katana against Abanak's throat.

The man swallowed nervously.

"You led us into danger," Leo informed him, voice gravelly around the pain of his arm. "Again."

Abanak peered at the jungle around them, hot now with the full light of the afternoon sun. Then he stared sadly at Leo, the sword at his throat ignored. "The river that called me...wasn't mine," he admitted, in a voice that croaked with damage but was, nonetheless, his own.

"Bingo," Raph growled. "Give the man a gold star."

"You chose wrongly. Also again. Get up," Leo ordered. Raph shoved Abanak to his feet, and Leo put his sword at the man's back.

Clutching his medicine bag, Abanak struggled to keep his balance on a damaged knee, his head dizzy from the blows he had taken. "I thought the voice belonged to the Great Turtle," he pleaded.

"Yeah, well, none of my relatives happen to enjoy sucking the life out of other beings. You might want to make a note of that." The sword prodded at him. "Now, walk. I'd love to end you, but the true Great Turtle seems to think you deserve a chance to try to fix some of your damage. So, if you think you've still got some redeeming value as a human being, start moving. Because the next time I see you, this blade's going all the way through."

Abanak nodded. Raph shoved the bundle of the man's pack into his arms.

"Tell your brother..." Abanak said, "I judged him wrongly..."

Raph's glare darkened toward violence.

Abanak moved.

When they returned to their brothers, Don's face was a shade of pale they'd never seen.

"Mike's bleeding," Don said. "On the inside. Look." He pointed to a purple bruise spreading on Mike's abdomen, which was beginning to swell.

"How bad is it?" Leo asked, kneeling.

"'m okay," Mike said. He coughed a little, tried to apologize, and coughed harder. A thread of blood formed at the corner of his lips, which had turned dry and blue.

"No," Raph choked at the sight of it.

Don stared at the trickle now leaking from Mike's mouth. "Oh, hells. It's bad," he breathed. "It's really bad."

He passed his hands over his brother in frantic, distracted imitation of Splinter's energy work, but stopped almost immediately. "This needs surgery. I can't fix this. He's – he's dying. Leo, what do we do?"

Mike blinked, trying to focus. "Dying? ...Tell Shad...she made me proud."

"Stop it!" Raph shouted. "Leo, Don, help me make a sling! We gotta get him out of this place, get him to a hospital – "

Don drew back, barely able to speak. "It's so far," he said. "We might kill him just moving him..."

Mike raised a hand weakly to touch both Leo and Don, reassuringly. He began to shiver.

"'Sokay. I got my brothers back...'sokay to die."

Raph dropped to his knees, touching Mike's boot, unable to bear the moment and equally unable to tear himself away.

They watched their brother's body shake.

Then –

"There's another way," Leo whispered. "Mike?"

They locked eyes, Mike's jaw clenched against the shock taking over his body.

"What?" Raph demanded.

"I can't choose this for you," Leo said, ignoring him.

Don's eyes widened. "You mean...?"

The Great Turtle nudged Raph from behind, then moved in close. Leo and Don hurried to make room as the massive head bent over Mike's.

Their brother reached up a trembling hand and touched the Great Turtle's beak.

"My child," the spirit of their ancestors told him, "I cannot repair the damage done by the Adversary. But I can return your body to what it was. You would be healed, and in a body like that of your brothers, again."

Mike's eyes squeezed shut in anguish, as his brothers waited.

The choice lay before them like some terrible grail.

A long minute ticked past, measured in their brother's wheezing breaths.

When Mike looked up again, he smiled into the sky, and his teeth were streaked with red.

"Sorry," he whispered. "Love...you guys."

He closed his eyes.

Leo forced himself into battle mind, racing after Raph through the forest. His unhurt brother ran chest forward, arms bent at the elbows to help cushion the ride of the one who lay between them. They'd tied a pair of tree limbs together with vines, then thrown a bedroll across the frame and lashed Mike down. Leo clutched the narrow end joint of the travois with his good hand and told himself the hasty bindings Don had wrapped around their brother's chest were the reason he couldn't see Mike's unconscious, shivering body breathe. Leo's own strained huffing went ignored.

_One thing to be said for Mike staying human,_ Leo thought. _He's a hell of a lot lighter, now._

He tried not to agonize about leaving Don to hobble, with his bo for a crutch, in their wake. Mike's decisions were forcing him to choose between brothers, after all.

Just as they had years ago, the Turtles reached the edge of the jungle much sooner than they should have, the trees changing on the very first hill after they left the tower behind. They'd hiked east nearly 30 miles during their time in the jungle, yet after barely 10 minutes they moved over the top of the hill overlooking the farmhouse. The valley shone like gold in the sunset. Raph charged on, not even pausing to look with relief on the absolutely normal oak and beech and fir trees surrounding them now.

He led them straight to the truck, hauling Leo in his wake the last quarter mile. They set Mike down gently before Raph smashed the lock off the camper top with one shot of his fist and threw the gates open.

"Still alive," Leo informed him. "His heart's racing, and the pulse is weak – " he paused to help heave their brother up again, easing him into the truck bed, "but it's there."

Leo followed after Mike with the help of a shove from Raph, who slammed the gates again and jerked the license plate free. This was one ride they'd make anonymously. Leo brushed the hair off Mike's damp, pale forehead as Raph dove for the porch and the knothole where they'd hidden the truck keys.

They made 80 mph within seconds of hitting the main road.

"Hang in there, Mikey," Leo whispered, trying to protect his brother from the worst of the jolts.

He fought back the memories of his own nightmare trip in the U-Haul after the Shredder Christmas.

"I never thanked you for that," he told the pale and sweaty face before him. "Never...for saving my life..."

Mike's head rolled to the side as they roared around a bend. Leo grabbed their emergency gear pack from its corner and hauled out a pair of ponchos. By the time he'd donned one, Mike's breath had begun to rattle.

A mile from Cooley-Dickinson Hospital, Leo pounded on the back window. "He's stopped breathing! I can't find his pulse!"

"Give him CPR!" Raph shouted, yanking around a slow-moving sedan that blared its horn at them.

"His ribs, Raph! I'll kill him!"

"Just do it! We're almost there!"

Leo cursed and started pumping, feeling the grate of bones. Bubbles of blood rushed up from his brother's mouth with every thrust.

It took everything Raph had not to drive the truck through the front doors. They were in luck. The emergency entrance zone was clear of people, except for an elderly couple shuffling toward the parking lot. Leo braced himself as Raph threw the pickup into park and leapt out.

Leo tossed his brother a poncho and sprinted for the doors wearing his own, returning seconds later with one of the gurneys stationed just inside. Raph lifted their still brother out of the truck and swung him bodily to the gurney. They laid Mike on it, fast but gentle, and rolled their brother in.

"Cardiac arrest!" Leo shouted as they burst into the waiting room. "Four or five broken ribs! It's been two minutes!"

People in white coats moved.

"Wait!" someone shouted.

He and Raph were already gone.

Don was waiting for them on the back porch of the farmhouse, leg extended in a fresh splint, watching the first evening stars.

Leo and Raph sat down on either side, then shared the thermos of water Don passed them.

"Hope you guys didn't pack anything important," he told them. "I had to leave most of our stuff."

"You got out, safe. That's what matters," Leo said.

Raph glanced at Don.

They waited.

"Did you get him there?"

Raph nodded.

"Was he still alive?"

They hesitated.

Don dropped his head and slowly rubbed the back of his neck. When he sat up, his hands began to knot.

"I don't understand," he said, in a bewildered voice. "We could have saved him. We almost even got him back."

"He chose differently," Leo said, his eyes on the leaf-scattered, overgrown lawn. "Maybe they can still save him. We called April and Casey; they'll be able to find out for us."

Don tried to turn the information into something that made sense. But only one idea would take form in his mind, the same one that had consumed him since the jungle that afternoon. "He'd rather be dead...than a turtle?" he finally asked in the same distressed voice.

Raph shook his head in negation. "No. He'd rather be dead than trapped."

Don found he didn't have an answer to that. Then he found he couldn't even find a question. He felt like he was falling through the chasm back in the jungle, dropping into a bottomless pit of fog. One of his folding and unfolding knuckles cracked.

"You'd think the Great Turtle could have healed him, somehow," he said, and his voice cracked.

"Donnie," Leo started.

Raph pulled Don against his shoulder. "It wasn't something you could fix," he rumbled. "It's just not."

"I wanted him back!" Don howled.

Leo sat looking up to the stars as his brothers, in their own ways, cried.

"If he lives," he said quietly, "if he doesn't...either way...we bring him home."

The car pulled up the long driveway just after 4 a.m. and discharged Casey, a puffy-eyed Shadow and a couple of duffle bags and groceries.

"Ape's going straight to the hospital," Casey said as it backed out again, leaving them in darkness. "I guess we'll know in a couple hours."

Shadow looked around the dusty, vacant entrance hallway as they stepped inside. "It's creepy here," she said.

"You used to love it," Raph commented from the stairs, coming back down after dropping off their bags.

"Well, it's creepy now. It looks like everything's dead. Why'd you have to come back?" she challenged.

"It's something we had to do, Shadow," Leo told her, pausing at the front door on his way to stand guard. "It had to do with the Great Turtle."

She shot him the most scathing of her 14-year-old's glares, and turned back to Raph. "Dad and April won't tell me anything. I want to know what happened to Mike."

Raph slowly moved down a few more steps, looking to the others for assistance. From his seat in the adjoining living room, rubbing at his leg, Don shrugged at him.

"There was this creature we fought a long time ago," Raph said, finally. "It preys on – on reptiles. Feeds off their sorrows. It wanted vengeance for us defeating it all those years ago."

"Reptiles?" Shadow looked bewildered. "Then why was Mike...?"

"He wanted to come," Leo said. "And I shouldn't have let him."

The others looked at him sharply.

"But I did, Shadow. I guess I'd finally stopped being afraid that...what he did would mean the end of us all."

Her chin came up. "So you figured this out just in time to get him killed?" Shadow's voice broke, and she folded her arms hard, turning away from Leo as she'd done for almost two years. "Now he might be dead, and we lost all that time. I didn't even get to say goodbye!"

The house fell silent.

"I'm sorry, Shadow. These last couple years, I was wrong. Okay? I was totally, completely tuned out to what was really going on." Leo paused a moment, then tightened the strap of his one katana sheath and slipped outside.

She didn't know what she would tell them.

April sat outside the hospital, the keys rattling in her hand.

She'd been thinking about it the whole drive from New York – was it illegal to drop off a grievously injured person and flee the scene? What would she say when the staff asked how she knew Mike was hurt and at the hospital? Would they believe she was a family friend? Had they found something odd in his blood or his X-rays and knew he hadn't always been human? If he'd already died, what would she do?

In the end, she took the ninja route. April drove the 45 minutes back to Holyoke and the nearest all-night department store, where she picked up a set of scrubs and white nursing shoes. When she returned to Cooley-Dick, she parked in the back lot and pulled the scrubs on over her jeans and top before slipping inside.

It took her seven minutes of work – swiping an off-duty nurse's tag, listening to staff conversation, and staying invisible – to find her way to the Intensive Care Unit and Mike's bedside.

Once there, she shucked off her scrubs, stuffed them into her handbag and took a seat between the machines. Three other beds crowded the room, all occupied. She kept her voice low.

"I'm here, Mike," she said. "It's April. Can you hear me?"

He didn't respond. She took inventory – a machine that breathed for him, a machine that monitored his heart, several IVs hooked into his arms to pump him with fluids, and a bag of what was obviously blood. She lifted and drew aside the top of his hospital gown, revealing a wide bandage across his chest, spotted with red seepage.

"Did you want to see his records?" a young woman asked.

April dropped the gown guiltily. "Ah, yes. Yes, please," she said.

The nurse's assistant returned with a folder already thick with documents. "Here," she said. "He's still listed as John Doe; I guess the paperwork you filled out downstairs hasn't made it, yet."

April nodded at the assumption, and the woman left with a sympathetic smile. April gushed air with relief.

The CPR, it turned out, had worked. Mike's heart had recovered a limp, erratic beat when he arrived, the documents said, though it failed once more before they could fully stabilize him.

But it had cost him.

He had a punctured lung, now, in addition to other internal organ damage from the five broken ribs. They'd performed surgery, setting two of the ribs with pins, patching the lung and suturing some of the internal bleeding.

John Doe, one sheet said, had type AB blood – universal recipient, she recalled – and injuries consistent with blunt force trauma such as from a fall. State police had been notified.

She couldn't find anything about prognosis.

But he wasn't dead. Not yet.

She focused, warmed her palms against each other, then ran them along Mike's energy meridians as Splinter and, later, the Turtles had taught her. She lay them then with infinite care over his belly and forehead and concentrated.

April stayed three long minutes, until a pair of nurses came in and began working on another patient. She pulled back her hands; squeezed his; fled.

Mike never moved.

The whole family stayed through the weekend, waiting together, unable to openly visit the hospital. Shadow started talking with Leo again, grudgingly.

April got in touch with the shelter the first day it was safe, saying she was a friend of Mike's and worried because he hadn't shown up for dinner plans. They told her he'd had an accident on a vacation trip up north. Police had ID'd him using fingerprints, they said, and guessed from his broken ribs and the water on his clothes and in his lungs that he'd fallen into the river somewhere.

"And he woke up yesterday just enough to confirm that when they asked," she told the others. "We've got us a cover story."

"So we can go see him?" Casey asked.

"We can go see him," April confirmed.

But –

Immediate family members only, they were told.

"We _are_ the closest thing he's got to immediate family now," April said, pointing to the "amnesia" record that had come up on his fingerprints file.

When the nurse only looked grim, Shadow – from pure frustration – started to cry.

The man winced, misunderstanding the sentiment. He waved them in, two at a time.

The breathing machine was gone. April lifted the hand that wasn't taped with tubes to her cheek. "Mike," she called, softly.

"Unca Mikey." Shadow lisped the pet name she hadn't used since fourth grade, squeezing between a set of monitors to lean over and kiss his forehead. "Wake up. Please wake up."

He got his eyelids open halfway against the sedatives. "Shad – " he wheezed in surprise.

"Shh, don't talk," April cautioned.

He rolled his eyes in her direction, and his dry lips cracked with the smile that had transcended his changing form.

"We found you, we found you," Shadow said, joyful. "Leo says you can come home – "

"Shadow," April hissed, glancing around for any spying nurses.

"Mike, you just get better, okay?" the girl told him. "That's all you have to do."

Their friend looked worried, suddenly, staring at his surroundings. "Hospital..." he gasped, then paused for breath. His hands moved vaguely on the bed and the heart monitor began to pulse.

"It's okay, Mike," April told him.

"Scared," he croaked.

April squeezed his hand. "You're safe, here," she soothed.

"Don't let 'em...change me back," he cried.

"No one's going to change anything. Shad, go get Casey."

Her daughter glared, to cover her fear, but obeyed, kissing Mike again before she fled.

Casey came in looking jumpy and miserable. "They were asking me about insurance and the accident and all kindsa stuff," he said. "How is he?"

"A little nervous from the meds, but he's going to be fine. Aren't you, Mikey?"

Mike looked at them, anguished.

"Go back to sleep, Mike. We'll be right here. You're safe, I promise. You just need to rest."

He closed his eyes, but his lips stayed pressed tight. Casey looked even unhappier, squatting on the chair across the bedside from April.

They listened to his breathing wheeze.

"Did...Leo..." Mike started, after a moment.

"Did he really say to come home?" April finished.

Mike tilted his head up, then down.

"He did," April told him, squeezing his hand.

"What'd you do to him out there, Mike?" Casey demanded. "Leo hasn't looked like the Grim Reaper even once, since we got to town. It's like he's happy again."

Mike smiled, squeezing back. The monitors calmed.

They let him sleep.


	13. Chapter XII Compass

**XII. Compass**

The Great Turtle sent him one last dream.

Shadow spooned more sugar over the blueberries in the chipped glass bowl, in time with a Christmas carol playing on the tinny old kitchen radio. Then she leaned forward and watched Mike rolling out pie dough in sure, smooth strokes across wax paper on the table, his forearms powdery with flour and his rolled-up sleeves edged in white dust.

Even after a year and a half, he could read Shadow's every move. Something was bugging her.

"What's going on in that busy blonde head?" Mike teased as he worked.

She tugged at the ponytail draped over her shoulder and frowned at him.

"How come you never visited before now?" she asked. "April invited you lots of times in those letters. And I know you got 'em, cause of what you wrote back to me. You were always answering what she told you about _my _stories."

"Only because a certain someone wasn't likely to _share_ the stories of how she got suspended trying to break into the school," April said from the stove, where gravy simmered and a pot of acorn squash soup threatened to boil.

"I'd forgot my homework!" Shadow protested. "And besides, I wanted to see if I could get in."

"Shoulda gotten Donnie to help you disarm the security system first," Mike told her.

"Michaelangelo," April warned.

Casey tried to cover his chuckle by clattering the pots in the sudsy dishwasher more loudly.

"I certainly would not have helped," Don said from the far end of the table, where he was building a small mountain of potato peels. "At least not until she's 18. Ask Raph when he comes in from guard duty; he's good with the basic systems."

April rolled her eyes.

"But Mike," Shadow insisted. "You didn't come."

Mike lifted a short, broad knife from the tabletop and trimmed a near perfect circle of dough. He lifted the corners of the wax paper and swung the finished crust over, letting it slide into the flour-dusted pie dish waiting at her side. Shadow started ladling blueberries in.

"I'm sorry, kiddo," Mike said finally, wadding up the ragged line of leftover dough and tossing it at Don, who caught it in one hand without looking, popped it in his mouth and resumed with the potatoes. "I missed hanging out with my Shadmonster. I wanted to be here."

"But you were scared of Leo," she said bitterly.

Mike laughed, glancing at the shadows of the back hall. "Nah, that wasn't it. I've tangled with plenty worse creeps. Just 'cause I don't feel like dealing with his crap doesn't make me scared."

She glared at him. "So you stayed away because the scientists or someone else would track us all down if you came?"

"No way. Hey," he said, shaking his head and stopping his work until she met his eyes. "I would never do anything to put you at risk, Shadow – at least, nothing that you or the family can't handle. Understand? I would never have gotten this change," he went on, holding up his dough-speckled, five-fingered hand, "if I thought it meant real danger to you. And I wouldn't have come tonight if I thought there was any chance I'd get followed by people meaning you – or your parents – or my brothers – harm."

He caught Don watching him and returned his brother's steady gaze.

"So _why_?" Shadow demanded, slapping the wooden ladle back into the bowl so drips of purple berries splattered on the wax paper.

"Why'd I hold off coming?" Mike pulled the filled pie back toward him and began folding strips of dough in a lattice across its top. "I don't know if this makes much sense, Shad, but – I knew I wanted it too much. If I'd come back all those times I wanted to, I might as well have not left in the first place. I'd end up hiding out here, safe in my – my comfort zone, they call it at the shelter. Acting like my kids, going back someplace that just ain't good..."

Mike trailed off, then gritted his teeth in embarrassment. "That's not what I meant. You guys are good. It's just...it wasn't good for me, for awhile."

"Because of Leo," she said with heat.

"No," he answered, absently.

April poured the gravy into a ceramic bowl and quietly covered it, left it on a warming plate and came to stand behind her daughter. "Take a look at him, Shadow," she said. "What do you think? Did he make the right decision, waiting to come back until he was ready? And until his brothers asked? Does anything about him feel different?"

Shadow squinted. Mike finished the top crust and sat down, munching the remnants of dough as the niece he'd helped raise scrutinized him.

"You feel like you're sad, Mikey," she told him. A tiny smile appeared at that, and he watched her thoughtfully in return. He could see April working up to say something, chastise maybe, then bite her tongue. "Yeah," Shadow continued. "Sad."

She tilted her head and considered him awhile longer. Don started chopping the potatoes, listening, as Casey tugged the plug free of the drain, rinsed his hands and came to April's side.

"But you don't feel lost anymore," Shadow said. "You kinda looked lost, all the time, before."

The last of the smile slid away and Mike swallowed, turning his attention to the blinds drawn protectively down the tall kitchen window.

April squeezed her daughter's shoulders. "I think you may be right," she said softly. "Mike...had to find his own compass..."

Their friend took a deep breath. He swiped his fingers through his hair, leaving a trail of white highlights in the mussed brown. "Aw, geeze," he said, glancing at his floury fingers. "Hang on a sec."

Mike jogged to the sink and washed both hands and arms in the warm water, then dried them with the towel, brushing flakes of dough from his sweater to the floor.

"After Master Splinter," Mike said, coming back to his seat, "I kinda think we all had to do that. Find our compasses. Well, maybe not Raph and Don so much." He looked to the second brother, who raised a brow at him and continued chopping. "Raph's always followed his own self, and Donnie, you can find your center in all sorts of things, from your computer stuff to fixing engines to physics and stars to – I don't know. You just, it doesn't matter what's going on around you, you hold your center.

"Me and Leo, it's different. I've been thinking about that. I just always wanted to do what was best for the family. Not like a martyr or anything. It's just – that's all I wanted. And by the time Splinter died – I don't know, maybe even before – we didn't have much left we hadn't already done a thousand times before. I mean, what else could I contribute? There was stuff calling to me that I knew I could do, that I knew could make a difference. But I couldn't quite see it or hear it or make it out. There was all this _junk _in the way, I couldn't even tell what it was. I just had to find a way to get through..."

He trailed off, shook himself a little, started gathering up the used wax paper.

"As for Leo..." He glanced to the hallway again, knowing if his brother cared to listen he'd hear well enough, "I think Leo's compass, besides Master Splinter, is always doing what he _thinks_ is the right thing. Except sometimes, and he's still got to learn this, even if you do everything exactly right, things don't turn out the way you want or even expect. Things, or people. They don't always come out peaceful, or safe, or in control."

Casey snorted. "You'd think he'd have figured that out from Raph a long time ago."

The family grinned.

"He figured out a long, _long_ time ago that that theory doesn't apply to Raph," Mike conceded. "But he really didn't expect to get a monkey wrench like one of us going human...from me."

Shadow picked up the ladle again and began running it around the glass, making the bowl rock as she scraped clumps of sugary blueberry juice from its sides. "So what," she muttered. "Who cares. I could have told him things get messed up. Why can't he just quit being a jerk and let you come home?"

Mike set his elbows on the table and propped his chin on his fists, hard. "'Cause he's Leo, Shadbabe," he said fiercely. "And he's still leader. He's head of the Clan, with Splinter gone.

"Come to think of it... By all rights, you should have started learning from him, training with him, by now. You need to start talking with him again."

"Why should I? He doesn't know anything you and Raph and Don can't teach me," she snapped.

Mike laughed. "I wish! Geeze, Shadow, the man can do more with half a chopstick than I could do with both of his katanas and – and a unicycle! C'mon, give the guy a break. This is between him and me, not him and you. Besides," he said, as she gave up on the bowl and sat forlornly under April's hands, a lump of angry misery, "who said that, even if he told me to, I'd come home?"

She looked up in surprise, and her expression hit him hard: it tore at him, scared and lonely the way she'd looked when she was five, saying goodbye...

He remembered that night clearly – the first time Shadow understood what it meant when her uncles donned their war gear and their faces went still and their spirits turned inward, and they didn't laugh or joke or want to play. She'd recognized, then, that they were preparing to do something that might take them away, forever, to a place she couldn't follow.

He collected himself.

"Shad," he said quietly. "You remember that time we had to leave on a mission? You were in kindergarten. You remember how I gave you Mr. Bear, my old bear from when I was still a little kid, so you'd know I was with you no matter what?"

Slowly, Shadow nodded.

"Someday," he continued, "you're going to grow up and go to college and go travel somewhere incredible, maybe lots of somewheres, and find a job and a home and people of your own and a life that's nothing but yours. And you'll come back and visit, lots and lots of times I hope, maybe even to live for awhile until you get on your feet, but – " Mike glanced around to the others, apologetic. "It won't be the same, when you do. Because you won't be the same. So right now, I'm the one who's not the same anymore. And I haven't done growing yet."

Over her daughter's nodding head, April sent Mike a look of approval.

"Someday, you know," she told him and Shadow and the rest of the room, "it's all going to work out."

"But he just said he doesn't belong with us anymore," she told the dusty table.

Mike shook his head. "Not right now, maybe. Who knows what could happen down the road? I'm just saying that...like with Mr. Bear, no matter where you are or who you become, I'll always still love you. We all will. That's not ever going to change."

"Knucklehead Mike's right," Casey said, tugging his daughter's ponytail. "But if you pull that roof-jumping stunt of yours one more time, you can forget about college. We're going to lock you in a box in the basement until you're too old to jump – like, 72!"

"You could try!" she shouted, springing up. "Mike already taught me how to pick every lock you could use!"

"She's good," Mike agreed, ruefully, balling up the wax paper remnants.

"Learned from the best." Don stood, too, scooping handfuls of potato cubes into a bowl for transfer to the stove. A buzzer sounded, and April slipped away to rescue the pumpkin pie from the oven. "Did Mike ever tell you, Shadow, about the time Raph got stuck on the wrong side of the security door at _Les Miserables_, and Mike had about 30 seconds to get it unlocked before half of Broadway came down on Raph's head?"

Casey started laughing. "Who cares about the lock? What the heck was Raph doing at a _play_?"

"Ohhh, that's a story for another day," Don said warily. Shadow began to plead. "C'mon, guys! He'll wreck another of my projects 'by accident' if I tell!"

Mike turned his head at a sound from the hallway. "Speaking of whom, I think Raph's back from guard duty... April, you didn't leave the pie out there, did you?"

Leo opened his eyes and watched the shadows on the ceiling for awhile. "'Monkey' wrench, huh?" he whispered after awhile. "Very punny, Mikey."

Leonardo grinned and slept deeply for the first time in something close to years.

Days passed. Mike got moved to a regular room. He told the state troopers he'd taken some vacation from the City to enjoy the foliage and search for inspiration for his folk song performances. Mike said he'd scaled a support wall on the Route 9 bridge to Northampton, hoping to land a photo of the river from an unusual angle, when he missed a handhold, lost his grip and fell.

"I remember a couple of guys...picked me up off the rocks downstream awhile later," Mike wheezed. "I don't...remember much. I know they were fishing...maybe without a license...and that's why they didn't...stick around? I've been thinking up...a few song lyrics about 'em... 'Riverside Angels.' You wanna hear?"

They didn't. They ruled Mike's case accidental, and his insurance agreed to pick up 70 percent of the costs of the hospital stay.

After the deductible.

And after the emergency room usage fee.

And after the surcharges for out-of-network providers.

Medications were another matter altogether.

"I better get some awesome royalties on that book," Mike whispered after hanging up the room phone.

The ride to the farmhouse that Friday evening hurt. It hurt more when Shadow, and then Raph, hugged him. He didn't mind.

"Only been 10 days," he protested. "Ow."

"It's been longer," Raph assured him.

They set him up in the living room. The first night, they all camped out on the floor in front of his couch/bed and toasted marshmallows in the fireplace. They told ghost stories and Shadow filled Mike in on everything she'd been doing since Christmas. Even with a wheezing voice that could only manage a few words at a time, Mike had them all sore with laughter from his tales of hospital food and wacky nurses and his roommate who snored like a truck.

"There," he said, satisfied, as Shadow clutched her sides and protested. "Now we've all...got achey ribs."

They drifted off, to sleep or to guard duty.

Sometime around 2 a.m., Mike woke and saw Leo watching him from the floor.

"Hey," he whispered.

"You destroyed everything," Leo told him. "I wanted to kill you."

Mike felt his stomach go cold.

"But you didn't destroy things, really. Did you? You just changed it all. The last two years...we didn't have this..." Leo gestured around the room of sleeping family. "We didn't have this because I couldn't let you change from who I thought you should be..."

Mike sighed.

"I'm so sorry," Leo said.

Mike forced a smile. "I missed you so much," he said, and his expression melted into tears.

Leo reached up and took his brother's open hand.

Mike said softly: "I'm sorry, too. For wanting you and Don and Raph to change with me, at first."

Leo tilted his head. "Did you change your mind when the procedure went so wrong?" His brother looked at him sharply. "I saw it in the dreams," Leo explained.

Mike hesitated. "Partly. They could do it better the next time, I'm sure. We'd make it go right. It...it was what happened after. Having to deal with bills, and losing so much of my training, and all kinds of people to keep track of, and working most of the day, and not getting to go all the places I used to without putting all those responsibilities at risk... It wouldn't work for you guys. It's not your style."

"Caught up in the rat race," Leo observed.

"Except these rats aren't anything like Master Splinter," Mike grinned. Then he grew quiet: "I saw him," he whispered.

"Who? Splinter? Where? When?"

"I'm not sure, exactly. I think it was still in the E.R. So... It would have been right after you guys got me to the hospital."

Leo pondered this. "When your heart stopped? Did he say anything?"

"Yes." Mike turned his head. "He said, 'Mike. You will go to the Dagobah system. There you will learn from the ninja master, Yoda-san.'"

Leo rolled his eyes.

"Nothing like that," Mike admitted. "He didn't say anything. He was just _there_. Like he always was, for all of us. Watching over and making sure I knew everything was okay."

Leo nodded. "I miss him," he said finally.

"Me, too."

They listened to the breathing of their family, the steady mumble of the fire's embers, the creaking of the house as it settled against the autumn chill.

"Do you remember how he talked after that winter," Leo asked, "about April's choice to take us into her life?"

Mike thought about it, turning his head a little to see that friend, curled under a knit throw across the room. "He said...she accepted the changes her choice would bring."

Leo nodded. "He said she gained more than she lost, even after the fire," he said. "Do you feel that way, too?"

"About...my choice?"

"Yeah."

His brother was quiet a long time.

"You know, there were times..." Mike said finally, "whole nights I couldn't sleep, trying to block out the memories, stop thinking about you and the others, stop thinking about what I wanted to say or do if we ever got to talk face to face. Losing you guys was like losing – I don't know, more than an arm or a leg. I didn't know how to _be_, anymore." He squeezed Leo's hand. "But I never...never wished I hadn't made the plunge."

Leo could hear Mike chewing at his lip, caught up in thought, just as his brother used to when they were young.

"That never changed," Mike finished. "And the good stuff – working with the kids, going shopping or playing tourist right out in the open on the streets, going skating at Rockefeller Center under the lights of the big Christmas tree, taking a girl out for coffee, getting to go anywhere and do all that stuff we always dreamed of – that made up, almost, for everything else."

"It wouldn't, for me," Leo said.

"I know.' Mike's free hand ran up and down his blanket, rubbing at his sore, shell-less chest. "After the first few weeks, I knew that about you. And Donnie and Raph. It's just different, for me."

"It is," Leo said. "I didn't want to admit it. But, Mike, you need freedom and change to be who you are. So be that. Do what it takes to find it. Show me what you discover along the way. I promise...I'll try to listen better, this time."

Mike smiled at the ceiling. "Do what it takes, huh?" he echoed. "You know, I've got these great plans for a children's home, and I just need a couple of millions dollars to get started. Can I hire you guys to rob me a bank?"

He almost busted a stitch as they tried to muffle their laughter.

When they finally quieted, Leo looked around thoughtfully. "You could do something with this place, maybe. If Casey and April were okay with it."

His brother's eyes went wide. He pushed himself up on one elbow, just a little, peering around the dark room and what he could see of the hallway with an intent expression.

When Mike lay back down, Leo would have sworn he could see a light in his brother's eyes.

"Funny," Mike sighed. "Getting you back...being back with everybody...it's the first time I'm really glad to have gone away."

The brothers fell asleep, linked together, five fingers wrapped in three.

That Sunday night, they loaded Mike onto an air mattress for the ride back to New York and gave him the Percoset from the hospital doctor's prescription. "Not this stuff again," he groaned.

It was too crowded, but Shadow rode in the back of the truck with the Turtles the whole way. On the highways, the five of them sang, and at the rest stops and in traffic practiced silent ninja signals. She passed out next to Mike before they left Connecticut.

Raph and Leo unloaded the truck in the cover of darkness, got their friends to bed, and collapsed with their brothers in Casey and April's living room well after midnight.

"I can make us some sandwiches," Leo told the room without moving from the loveseat. "If anyone wants it…"

No one budged. "Too tired to eat," Mike said finally from the couch, where he'd been eyeing the heirloom teapot beside Splinter's shrine on the mantel. He pushed himself up with an effort and stared at the old Oriental carpet, still stained with juice from Shadow's younger days, while he tried to gather the energy to stand. "I should go…back to my place." The single room he'd called 'home' for more than two years suddenly seemed dark and cheerless. Worse, it was too far away.

Raph cleared his throat. "Yeah, about that…ya might wanna stop in the spare room before ya go. I think there's some stuff in there that you're gonna want."

Mike groaned. "Can it wait?"

"No, I don't think so." His brothers traded a look that Mike couldn't interpret.

"Awright, awright." Mike got his feet under him, grumbling, and staggered off to inspect the third bedroom. April and Casey kept it as a kind of standing guestroom, ostensibly for Shadow's friends, although it had never been used by anyone but the Turtles.

Mike hit the light switch.

He froze.

It was all there. The drawings from the kids at the shelter, the stacked boxes holding his Goodwill-rescued clothes, the magazine cutouts, the posters – even his prize possession, the painting of the linked hands, hung in its proper place above the bed. The desk was piled high with his notebooks and books. The bed had been made, recently, using the same thick blanket he'd gotten from the Salvation Army store with his very first paycheck.

His bookshelf from the tunnels stood against the wall, too. It was crowded with the trinkets and mementos from an entirely different life, each one a memory that seemed to strike him deep inside. A few of the posters on the wall, he noticed now, showed deep creases from when they'd been crumpled. Someone must have rescued the ones he'd trashed, smoothed them flat and hung them up with the rest.

His wooden gear box stood at the bottom of the bed, its lid propped against its side, revealing the layers of weaponry and protective gear within.

Shadow had placed his old teddy bear on the pillow.

"Hope you don't mind," someone said behind him. Mike turned to find his brothers watching him through the doorway.

"Mind? Why? You?" He couldn't figure out what to ask first.

Raph shrugged, looked away. "Well, the rent was due, and all, and we didn't have any money, so…" he shrugged again.

"You're going to have those medical bills," Don added.

"Didn't seem like you should go homeless," Leo finished. He looked Mike square in the eye. "After all, you have a perfectly good home here."

He couldn't speak.

"You can snag your own place again, soon as you want," Raph said nervously. "In the meantime, just save up and do your own thing. We'll stay out of your, uh, hair." He flicked the brown mess.

Don stumped forward on his crutch and peered over at the room again, as Mike snagged Raph's offending finger. "I don't know if we hung everything right," Don said, "or set stuff up in the best layout, Mikey. I'll help you rearrange it the way you want in the morning."

Mike smiled, letting Raph's hand go. He finally had words. He grabbed his brothers, gentle around their injuries, until they were all tangled up together again.

Mike leaned into his family.

"It's perfect," he said.


End file.
